AS WE CROSSED THE LAWN, I FOUND MYSELF FALLING BEHIND, a fugitive of his scrutiny and a spy. In the two months since our drink at the Capitol Hotel, he had grown his hair back, and it had come in differently than I remembered—darker, and also somehow finer. He opened the driver’s-side door, and I walked around the tailgate and marveled at the strange turn of events that placed me here, my son’s passenger in my own car. When Belsky had failed, as I knew he would, to follow up on his invitation to take Elliot water-skiing, for my son’s sake I had asked him to make it real, and since then Elliot had spent afternoons at their house a dozen times. Belsky’s eldest son, Tim, had his license and the keys to a 1974 Ford Pinto. This is how I found myself attempting to teach my son to drive.
In the night, a heavy fog had descended on our valley, and although it was clear now, the windows were still filmed with a fine mist of condensation. From inside the car, we couldn’t see out in any direction. As he reached for the rearview mirror, I expected him to notice this, but his adjustment was quick, almost sloppy, and he put the key in the ignition and turned it. Then he laid his hand on the back of my seat as I had taught him to do, looked over his shoulder, and shifted the car into reverse.
Although I was usually able to restrain myself, I turned my head too. Three rivulets of water had drawn lines in the thick film of mist. Through them, I could see the green of our neighbor’s front lawn and nothing more. We began to roll backwards, and I felt a pinch of heat beneath my arms.
Elliot braked abruptly and laughed. “Geez, Dad!”
He set the parking brake and got out, leaving his door open. A breeze filled the front seat. He pulled the arm of his sweatshirt over his hand and wiped the windows down with broad strokes, leaving a scalloped border of mist around their edges. When he got back in the car, he was still shaking his head. “Weren’t you going to say anything?”
“I wasn’t worried.”
“I’m thinking, Here we go. I’m going. I’m backing up.”
“I knew I was in good hands.”
He laughed through his nose and released the brake. This kind of prank had been common since we had begun his driving lessons. He seemed to expect me to doubt his competence, and although he’d made me nervous more than once, I’d controlled the urge to warn him. When we reached the Catholic church parking lot where we had been practicing K-turns, there was a gardening truck directly behind us and a bicycle was making its way down the sidewalk towards the driveway, and Elliot turned into the lot without signaling. I was considering saying something about at least this when he said, “I’ve got one more question for you.”
“What’s that?”
He pulled into a spot by the rectory door. A rough draft of his biography paper was due the following week, and the truth is I was looking forward to the lull this might provide. I was glad he was learning to manage a long-term project, and his teacher had done her best to break it up by dividing the work into three six-week phases, but his questions had not really subsided after he’d finished the outline of his research. In the last two months, I had sometimes wondered if the questions he asked were even for his paper. In fact, if I am being honest, I sometimes had the temptation to telephone Mrs. Parks on some pretext to learn whether the assignment had ever truly been changed to require focus on an ancestor.
He threw an arm over the back of the bench seat, his hands inches from my shoulder. It might have seemed affectionate, but his eyes weren’t looking at me. They were on the space behind him where any driving instructor should want them to be.
He backed up slowly. “I need to know about a time when your dad scared you,” he said, and he braked and shifted into drive again.
The parking lot was empty. There was a church service program stuck to the pavement by rain.
“Your teacher asked you to include this?”
“Yeah.” He pulled forward.
“Every student is to include a segment on the frightening behavior of an ancestor?”
“That’s right.”
He shifted into reverse and backed into the space he’d left along the hedge.
I said, “How did she phrase it? What exactly did she tell you to do?”
“She said to make sure we got a full picture of the subject. We should ask our primary sources about bad behavior as well as good deeds.”
He threw a hand over the seat again. I looked in the side mirror, waiting for his reversal. When it didn’t come, I turned to see that this time he was in fact looking not at the space behind him, or the stretch of asphalt ahead, but instead at me. The corners of his mouth turned up.
I said, “I thought you were doing a K-turn.”
“I did it already.”
“Another one, I mean.”
He coughed into his fist—a fake cough designed to relieve tension: mine. Then he said, “You don’t have to answer now if you don’t want to.”
“No, no. It just seemed a little odd, is all.”
“We can talk about it at dinner—”
“Let me just think a minute….”
“Really, Dad. I’d rather have you come up with a good one than make up something lame or evasive on the fly.”
And with that, he shifted into drive and carried me back onto the road.
When he was late for dinner that night, I was at first grateful, but after twenty minutes, I sat down at the kitchen table where through parted curtains I had a view of the cul-de-sac. I opened the newspaper. “Drought in Ethiopia.” “Artificial Heart Still Pumping.” It wasn’t the first time in the last month he’d been late, and although this should have made it easier tonight, so far each time was just as difficult as the first. This was something elemental, I was beginning to see, to parenting an older child. Even at a distance of yards, each step away was a fresh shock.
For example, looking back, I am bewildered, even a little embarrassed, by my surprise when, just after Christmas, he had asked if he could move into the attic. The remodel had been his idea, he had worked hard on it, suggested the addition of a bathroom at the last minute, and he was a teenager whose small bedroom shared a wall with his parents’ and opened onto a stairwell that carried even the faintest radio noise all the way to the kitchen. “I was thinking…,” he had said. “I mean, I already do my homework upstairs, and you and Mom don’t really use it.” I knew right away what he was going to say—was in fact already feeling stupid for not having anticipated it—and although immediately I saw that I would say yes, a tightness in my chest made me pretend for more than a minute to believe he merely meant he wanted to use some of the attic for storage.
When I finally conceded, I did not feel much, but I had imagined stalling would be possible in the logistics of it—the purchase of a different bed or the installation of a hanging rod in the closet for his shirts. As it turned out, he was happy to live a life split between rooms until these details were resolved. He kept his clothes downstairs and slept on the attic couch until his new bed was delivered, and I felt foolish as I watched the delivery men heft it up the stairs. A new bed was obviously not a necessity, but once I had used the suggestion to delay, I could hardly make this point. There were blinds for the dormer windows, which shone two bright squares on his bed at six A.M.; a low bureau that fit the height of the knee wall; new bedsheets. In the end, the move upstairs cost almost nine hundred dollars. Although on principle this probably should have formed some part of my hesitation, the fact is, it was something much simpler. My stomach felt light at the thought of him moving farther up the stairwells of my house, his footsteps mere taps above our bed and altogether traceless from the kitchen, as if this move were a late stage in the rising-and-vanishing that has been the cartoon representation of all the fears I was granted on the day he was born.
These late arrivals at dinner seemed another. Now they happened once, sometimes twice a week. I glanced at the window again and tried hard not to think of the kind of amused detachment with which he had regarded me during the driving lesson that morning. I read an article about the long preparations for Challenger’s maiden flight. Finally, finally, Belsky’s old gray Pinto with the rusted fenders and the missing side mirror pulled into the cul-de-sac and jerked to a stop in front of our driveway. Elliot stepped out of the passenger side and laid a hand on the roof, talking. When he slammed the door, the car lurched away, and he walked towards the house across the lawn. He brought cool air in with him, and Liz turned on the flame beneath a frying pan.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Liz said. “Did you have fun?”
“Pretty much.”
“Did he have any good new Atari games?”
“One, but we didn’t really play it.”
“What did you do?”
“Sat in the hot tub, mostly.”
She cut a look at me and winked. Every week she had a new explanation for the hours he spent there: Joyce served junk food; Robert let them tinker with the engine on the beat-up Ford.
The hamburgers hissed as she set them in the pan. “That hot tub must make Tim’s a great place to hang out.”
“I guess.” He pulled a spatula from a pitcher of spoons she kept on the counter and handed it to her. He had grown deft, almost overnight, at evasion. “How was work?”
“Great,” she said. “They say I’m almost ready to take calls on my own.”
Last month, she had begun training at the Crisis Center, just as I’d asked her to, and at the time I was still proud of myself for the boost it seemed to give her. Twice that month I had overheard her talking on the phone to one of her sisters, describing her trainer, or explaining the principles of “passive assistance,” and although she still tried to engage me on the topic of Elliot’s visits to Belsky’s house, in general my deflections seemed less of a frustration to her. I was considering this, trying to focus with satisfaction on the way I had helped her, when the stack of plates on the counter began to rattle. Little jolts of movement beneath our legs. All three of us grabbed the lip of the counter. I am sure Liz would have stepped towards us to usher us to safety, but it did not last long enough. She turned off the heat beneath the pan, and we followed her into the living room.
Already there was a bright red icon in the upper-right-hand corner of the TV screen: AFTERSHOCK! The newscaster’s lipstick was candy pink.
“What may have been an aftershock of the October earthquake just struck the greater Sacramento area. We don’t have details yet, but the flood of calls to our hotline suggests that the people of Sacramento are deeply concerned and ready to band together again as they did last fall.” Then they ran a montage of clips from their coverage of the earthquake: again the ten-car accident; again the people streaming senselessly from the façade of the capitol building.
“Oh, man,” Elliot said.
Liz laughed. “Should we eat in here?”
And although I suppose I sensed even then that the spasm of familiar ease in him would not last, briefly I was overcome by a weird gratitude for the trick of nature that had triggered it. On screen, a broken window on a stagecoach in Old Sacramento. Liz and Elliot laughed again.
“Yes, let’s,” I said. “But I think we’re going to need some popcorn.”
THERE IS SOME IRONY THEN THAT, WHEN I OPENED THE kitchen door a few evenings later, I smelled sewer gas. My father and I had encountered something like this only once, on a call to a row house on Adeline Street. A heavy woman and four children waited on the stoop beneath dripping icicles, and we could smell it through the windows, which were open, before we even climbed the stairs. Steam rose in a column beside her skirt where one of them had vomited in the snow.
Initially, at least, all I felt was fear. Sewer gas is a noxious mixture of methane, hydrogen sulfide, gasoline vapor, carbon monoxide, acetylene, ammonia, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and a little oxygen. Ventilation is important, but methane, hydrogen, gasoline vapor, and acetylene are explosive in the presence of oxygen. Hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide are poisonous. Hydrogen sulfide is also corrosive. And standing at the threshold to my kitchen, what bothered me most was that sewer gas has a notoriously varied effect on people. While some may work a lifetime in poorly ventilated sewers without trouble, others have died shortly after descending too hastily into a manhole.
When I reached the front hall, they were both standing there. Liz had kicked off her shoes, a pair of pumps she sometimes wore to volunteer, her toes a smooth unit beneath her panty hose. A fine run traveled up her leg from the heel. Elliot’s forehead betrayed the barest trace of perspiration in its shine.
Liz said, “I picked up Ellie at the library. We haven’t been here long.”
I felt a breeze on my forehead, and the sheer underdrapes in the living room sucked out the window and waved like flags.
She said, “We opened all the windows.”
Elliot said, “What happened, Dad?”
I made myself smile. “Let’s find out,” I said.
We started in the powder room, and this time I did the work myself, because I knew I couldn’t feign patience if he was slow. He made himself of use. He put a baking pan under the pipe to catch the water that would slop out if the trap was full, and sitting on the threshold with the flashlight he did his best to shine a beam on my work. But I didn’t really need it. When I swung the trap free, it was easy to see the pipe was empty. “Eureka,” I said, but neither of us could make ourselves smile at this. I swung the pipe back into place and scanned hopefully around the floor of the cabinet for signs of leaking—at the little basket of colored guest soaps and the stack of white hand towels Liz stored there—as I tightened the nut. But there were none. I stood and turned the water on.
Fixture traps started appearing in American homes around the turn of the century; their proper functioning, by this time, is well understood. A little slug of water in a U of pipe will keep gases out of the house, and when a tap is shut off, gravity will make water settle in the U every time. Not much can get in the way of this. In Saudi Arabia or Death Valley, a plumber probably comes across some that evaporate, but even this only when a family leaves for a very long vacation. If a piece of floss runs down a drain and by luck gets beached on the high side of the trap when the water is shut off, it can draw the water slowly across the hump and leave it dry. But this is as unlikely as it sounds, and the evidence is there when you open the trap. A clog or crack can conceivably create a vacuum when you run a fixture somewhere else in the house, and this could suck a trap dry if the conditions are just right.
The primary offender, though, is installation error, and now that my fear of the potential danger had waned, I found it was replaced by a distressing suspicion that the culprit was the vent pipe Elliot had roughed-in in the attic. There was a long horizontal run behind the knee wall. If he hadn’t used enough strap hangers to attach it, a plastic pipe might sag enough to collect a slug of rainwater during big storms. As I said, I had checked his work each day, but in my yearning to show respect for him I had often moved too quickly to approval, and I saw how easily I could have overlooked something like this. The work had been reviewed by an inspector as well, but the man the county sent had been an amateur gardener, and he gazed out the new opening at Liz’s roses to ask me questions about the composition of our soil. He smelled of cinnamon gum and jiggled his keys in his pockets. His lack of focus had bothered me even then.
It might have saved me some time to suggest this possibility first, but at the thought of implying and investigating an error in Elliot’s work, I had difficulty swallowing. We would have to move his bed away from the wall; take down the calendar with the girl in the green swimsuit; cut through the Sheetrock we had raised together with a block and tackle; pull back the insulation he had stapled to the studs. It has since become clear to me that I was guilty of a thick-headed obliviousness to most of Elliot’s deepest needs, but at the time I still believed that respect for his privacy and competence were chief among them.
Instead, we spent the next half hour on tests. Elliot jogged down the hall and ran a faucet or flushed a toilet, and when he called to me from the landing, I lowered a screwdriver bit down the drain. Each time it came up glistening. “Still wet,” I would say, and wipe it dry with a hand towel. When he came downstairs finally, he was panting.
“That’s everything,” he said.
“Did you run the tubs?”
“Yes.”
“And then did you run the water through the shower heads as a separate test?”
“Yes.”
“What about the attic?”
He nodded. This was enough said, for now. I moved quickly to the only other explanation I could think of.
I said, “It must have been simultaneous use, then.”
He furrowed his brow.
I said, “You flushing a toilet while Mom was running the dishwasher, for example. If there’s a crack or clog in the pipe, a combination of fixtures can siphon a trap too.”
He set his glasses back on his ears. “So how will we figure it out?”
“We’ll have to do a smoke test.”
And before he could ask me what this was, Liz appeared in the hall with a glass of wine. “Dinner’s ready,” she said.
She was prepared. While we worked, she had closed all the windows, betraying an underestimation of the problem I could not bring myself to correct, and she had brought out the new slide projector and screen, along with four carousels from the history she’d spent the holidays organizing, sorting through paper bags and shoe boxes of old photos, eyeing negatives with a jeweler’s loupe, and making long lists for the specialists at Ken’s Cameras of the images she’d use to tell our story in slides. As we ate, she clicked through them: the frame of our house tied with balloons, the grandfather clock I had built, Liz pregnant and asleep on the sofa, Elliot’s second birthday, a potluck celebrating my first promotion, Yosemite, and finally the three of us at the Grand Canyon, the one that made my heart swell. As each new image flashed up on the screen, she shared little memories, and soon so did we, and by the time we stood up, we were able to clear the table and do dishes and switch off lamps talking about what she had made us see, conjured magically from my gift of cowardice to eclipse the details of the plumbing problem.
But of course, for me, beneath the surface ease, it was always there. As she washed her face, she kept up a steady patter about the slides, but I was focused on the water swirling down the drain. It took only fifteen minutes for her to fall asleep, and as soon as she did, I got up in the dark and crept downstairs to check. The trap was still full, but I couldn’t help worrying about what might happen if either of them rose in the night and flushed a toilet. I tried to console myself that we were not in a densely populated neighborhood, so the concentration of gases in the city line was probably low, but, given the potential danger, this was an irresponsible line of thinking. I went to the keypad by our front door and deactivated our burglar alarm. I slid the powder room window open, stepped out into the hall, and closed the door. Then I went back upstairs and sat down at the desk in my study and looked out over our lawn.
In my twenty years living there, I had heard of only two burglaries in our neighborhood, but this did not really make me feel any better. When I was five, at my mother’s insistence, my father had installed iron safety grates on all our windows in Trenton. These were hinged, and could be opened, but we always kept them locked, and as I fell asleep, at first I found them a comfort. I wasn’t old enough to know then about the crime in our neighborhood, but what I did know was that before he installed them, my mother would come to check and recheck the latch on my window as soon as she thought I’d fallen asleep, and afterwards she did not. It was the waning of her fear that calmed me. She was not an openly emotional woman—her eyes didn’t well up when I painted her a picture, and she didn’t yell when I tracked mud on the floor—but the full, violent force of her maternal love could be glimpsed in her irrational obsession with my safety. She wore a pair of nursing gloves in the kitchen when she was sick. She held a hand to her chin when I pumped high on the swings at the Veterans Park playground. And when I went to stay the night at other boys’ houses, she called their mothers to ask a list of pointed questions: whether they kept their doors locked at night, whether they heated their house with a woodstove, and whether they kept a gun in the house.
In my earliest memories my father was sympathetic, even delicate with these worries. He did not protest when she insisted on the security grates, although it hurt his sense of aesthetics to install them. He liked to whittle in the evenings—toy soldiers for me, mostly—and although I sat close to him while he worked and pestered him with requests to let me handle the knife, each time, he would slide his eyes towards my mother to read the look she gave him and then tell me it wasn’t time.
It may in fact be the first sign of the changes that would come over him later that when I was nine, he sat me down at the kitchen table and gave me my own knife. I looked immediately to my mother when he did this, and although she did not say anything, there was something—a whiteness in her skin tone, or a stillness in her posture maybe—that made me sure he had not discussed this with her. I suppose it is a measure of just how much she trusted and loved him that she didn’t object. Her breath caught when I stood on a stool to get a cup from the cupboard, but she said nothing each night when my father took my whittling knife from his dresser and handed it to me over the kitchen table. Even after my second accident, she did not question his choice. Blood seeped out of my thumb in time with my heart, and she made a businesslike bandage of gauze and tape because the precut adhesive variety were more than we could afford. Then she served us some chicken.
Even back then, I recognized the half hour when I whittled with my father as a violation of the natural order of things in our house. All predictability of behavior was suspended, and as much as I loved the knife, and the attention from my father, and the challenge of the whittling, the strangeness of these lapses was painful. My mother’s fear had always been a burden to me on the playground, but I found its absence was much more unsettling. I spent most of the time as I worked the knife trying hard to imagine what she was thinking, and I think each cut I suffered can be attributed to the distraction of this. Looking at the grates on my windows as I tried to sleep, I would try to reconcile these contradictions, and I would fall asleep trying to see the world through my mother’s eyes.
Now in my study looking out at my cul-de-sac, I think some of the sensitivity I felt to the open window below me was hers. My eyelids grew heavy, but I felt a buzzing at the top of my head and looked out my window at the three-quarter moon. Finally, I went downstairs to the kitchen and took three cans of tomatoes from the cupboard and stacked them outside the closed powder room door. It made me feel better, but seemed somehow embarrassing, and so upstairs I groped quietly for my travel alarm clock in the closet and set it for five o’clock. I slept fitfully, thinking of prowlers, waking to every sound, and trying not to lose heart at the thought that Liz noticed this and pretended that she was still asleep. I tried to remind myself that they had preoccupations of their own. Elliot had been working in his room each afternoon, hunting and pecking out the long rough draft of his paper on my father, and other days driving, I guessed, on back roads with Tim Belsky in a car that engine-work had made seem his own, and Liz had finished her training and begun answering calls at the Crisis Center. At breakfast she filled the air with stories of this—a man who had not left his trailer in a week; a girl with a handful of purple pills—and Elliot flipped through his Road & Track so that I could almost imagine they were not thinking about how the house I had built had filled with poisons while they were at home alone.
I forced myself to endure a normal morning at work, but at lunch, I drove to Briggs Plumbing Supply. Through the window glass, I saw Larry’s wife sitting behind the counter watching her TV. The show held her so rapt that she did not notice me there, less then seven feet from her, staring. On the counter next to her was a small box of fruit punch and half a cheese danish on a paper plate spotted with oil. When I came through the door, she looked up. “Back for more Drano?” she said.
“I’d like to rent a smoke pump.”
She picked up her box of punch and took a sip through its tiny straw. “What for?” she said.
I can still recall the mixture of ire and disorientation she stirred in me. Larry had worn an apron and kept a bottle of glass cleaner behind the counter. I wondered what had drawn him to her.
“Something I’d like to check with a smoke pump,” I said.
She smiled a little and shook her head. Then she slid off her stool and disappeared through a narrow doorway into the storeroom.
Next to the cash register lay a strip of paper from a fortune cookie and a gray button on a piece of broken thread. Behind the stool sat a pair of running shoes and socks shaped by recent wear.
When she reappeared she had a box of bombs and a device that looked like a hair dryer. “If you’re such a big do-it-yourselfer, you should consider buying one of these,” she said.
“Thanks, but I think I’ll just rent.”
She started ringing it up. “I just helped the last of my three boys pass his licensing exam. The book says on average homeowners who do some of the repairs themselves end up paying for twice as many service calls from licensed plumbers.” She paused over the keys and looked at me. “My point is, you could have a lot of work cut out for you that calls for a smoke pump.”
“I’ll just rent,” I said, and handed her my credit card.
She shrugged and then held the card with two hands and examined it. Her fingernails were pink, but the polish was chipped. “Luther Albright, eh?” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
She looked up at me. “So what do you do if you’re not a plumber?”
She picked up her juice box and took another sip. It was annoying, but it seemed peevish not to answer her question.
I said, “I’m a civil engineer.”
She stared at me blankly. She was holding me hostage again, asking me questions instead of ringing me up. I said, “I design dams.”
She grinned. She was clearly waiting for me to ask what was funny about this, but for some reason it felt critically important not to. My resistance didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. She said, “You’re going to need a lot of Drano for a clog like that.” Then she turned and ran the credit card through the template.
When she handed me the slip, she held it down for me with those chipped fingernails. It would again have seemed absurdly testy to pull the slip out from under them and hold it for myself, but that is what I wanted to do. Instead, I signed it quickly and she picked it up to separate the copies. She held one out for me, but not very far, so that I had to reach for it.
“Bye-bye, Luther Albright,” she said.
Then she turned back to her TV.
IT SEEMED RIGHT TO ME TO ASK ELLIOT TO ADMINISTER THE test. Somehow I was already certain the path of this problem would lead us to examining his work in the attic, and I felt any respect for his abilities I could demonstrate along the way would counterbalance this. So it was that I found myself crouched in the grass beside him again, checking for signs of decay in my house.
When he lit the first bomb, the air filled with a singed smell and he set it inside the cleanout. Then he switched on the pump, which was loud, like a hair dryer, and fit the nozzle inside the pipe behind the bomb.
“What next?” he said.
“We have to wait at least ten minutes for the smoke to fill the pipes. If there’s a crack, the smoke will work its way into the walls and out into the room around the switch plates and doorjambs.”
“And if there’s not?”
“We won’t see any smoke inside the house.”
“Where will it come out?”
“The vent stack. On the roof.”
He looked up to indicate his bet. I ignored this.
I said, “I think I’ll go inside and have a bite to eat while we wait.”
He made no move to join me, and I didn’t try to lure him. Alone in the kitchen, I took a mason jar of mixed nuts from the windowsill and sat down at the table facing a wall, hoping to see the smoke that would reveal a freak cause. The summer I worked for my father he had gone to a convention in Atlantic City, and he came back with plumbing mysteries of various kinds. For trap-seal loss, there was the story of a squirrel that had crawled down the vent stack and could not turn around to escape. As he struggled over the next few days, his body position from time to time occluded the passage completely, causing siphoning in one or more fixtures. The problem was not diagnosed until, after several days of struggle, the squirrel died and produced a smell distinct from the sewage stench the trap-seal loss had caused.
Although he must have known from the way I pored over my plumbing manual that I would have been interested in this story, it was days before he got around to telling it. When he first returned from the trip, all he seemed to want to talk about was what the attendees had done with their evening hours. There had been a show, apparently, with dancers who wore very little but sequined body stockings and feathers like exotic birds, and my father had a picture of himself with one of these dancers. My mother laughed when she saw the photo, not in a mean-spirited way, but as if she thought that was what had been intended, and her laughter seemed to make my father angry. “That’s good, Lucille,” he said. “Most of the wives don’t see it that way. They’d be afraid their husbands would run off with dancers.” Then he slipped the photo into the frame of a mirror that hung in our living room where it still sat, curling at its free edge, when I went home years later for his funeral.
It was a posed picture, clearly the kind of thing men stand in line to get, and that performers offer grudgingly, checking a clock between shots to see how soon they’ll be free to enjoy themselves, but when he’d first shown it to us I was too young to know this, and it seemed a remarkable thing. In my early boyhood, my father had been devoted to my mother. Like Belsky, he had never bothered to hide his appreciation of other women’s looks, but it was a clear escalation of this self-indulgence to hint at the possibility of infidelity. And if anything could be more selfish than joking about lust in front of your wife, it would be allowing your adolescent son, who is no doubt wrestling with such urges for the first time himself, to witness this same hint of how destructive they can be.
But I was allowing myself to become distracted. This was happening more often as Elliot typed out his draft, and each time it seemed a weakening of my resolution to keep such stories to myself. I put the jar of nuts back on the windowsill and got up and wandered the house, scanning for plumes of smoke. Basement, front hall, laundry room, up the stairs into our bedroom, our closet, our bath. Warring impulses had kept Liz from transforming Elliot’s old bedroom completely. It was tidy, and the drawers had been cleared for guests, but it still had his old bedspread, and a poster of cars through the decades on the wall. I headed upstairs and braced myself for a familiar feeling of dislocation. More and more, his new room in the attic was striking me upon my rare visits as a foreign land. Ticket stubs from an Oakland Raiders game. Soda cans from a drink called Squirt. There was the swimsuit calendar on the wall that I remembered, but now there were dirty dishes that seemed unlike him to leave out, and, even more conspicuous, through the open doorway of the bathroom he had built, hanging over the shower curtain rod, a pair of girl’s underpants.
I should say in defense of my insight that I knew right away that he intended I see these, but it seemed to me that the response he was testing for was some expression of distrust, or disrespect, or paternal misunderstanding of the adult he was becoming and the privacy that he felt should be his right. I imagined what my own father would have done, which was to say something crude that at once showed a galling assumption on his part that he understood what I wanted from intimacy with a girl, and that also belittled whatever more complex relationship the presence of her underwear implied; this, or quick outrage at the sneaking around that was only one possible explanation for how they’d made their way into my room. Now, standing in Elliot’s bathroom, to my utter surprise I felt the easy rise of these same assumptions and this outrage, and it was partly due to shame at this unexpected kinship with my father that I decided I would not comment on the underpants at all.
The window behind them was wide open, and I knew this was for my benefit as well. When I leaned out to look up the roofline, smoke was streaming out the vent pipe and Elliot sat next to the chimney, eating an apple.
The dormers sit about four feet above the eave and the roof rises at an angle of thirty-five degrees. Unless it’s raining, it is not unreasonably treacherous to climb out the window, but somehow it was something it had never occurred to me that he might do. In addition to the distraction of the panties, it may in part have been embarrassment about my nervousness at seeing him in so vulnerable a place that made me act as if there was nothing unusual about his location, but I see now that this was probably a letdown as well. I climbed out after him as if I myself had done it before, keeping a hand on the eave of the dormer as I worked my way up to the ridge and settled next to him on the damp shingles. When I did, Elliot wrapped his napkin around the apple core and crumpled it. He pulled his two hands back just above his right shoulder like a basketball player and held it there a moment. Then he pushed up and cocked his wrist to release it, and it disappeared down the chimney.
It was a strange thing to have done, disrespectful and provocative and too-unimportant-to-be-upset-about all at once, and I decided right away I would say nothing about this either.
Our neighbor was trying to start the mower in his yard. One pull. Two pulls. Three. It was a relief, finally, hearing the motor whine.
“So what do you think?” Elliot said.
It may have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that recently he had asked a lot of questions that could be interpreted in any number of ways: some dice-throw kind of effort to see what I might reveal. Although it was very likely he was talking about the cause of the trap loss, and not the underpants or the apple core, I didn’t take this for granted.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Design flaw maybe.” His tone was innocent, but I had difficulty believing he was not aware of the slight embedded in his guess. I waited a second before responding so I could keep the trace of irritation from my voice.
“Could be. It probably would have caused more than one failure in all these years though.”
“What then?”
Immediately, I pictured him working alone in the attic, bare-chested and bobbing to angry music, fitting the vent to the studs behind his wall. I pictured this, and then I told him the story about the squirrel.
He furrowed his brow. “You think there’s a squirrel in there?”
“No, no.” We rarely saw squirrels in our neighborhood. “I’m just saying weird things can happen.”
“So what do you think caused it?”
He was squinting now, his jaw set in an expression of disdainful mock confusion. It would have been easy, and I’m ashamed to admit, sort of satisfying, to wipe the look from his face by pointing out that by far the most likely cause was his own adolescent sloppiness. But in a feat of paternal empathy I would briefly count among my greatest, I said: “A temporary clog.”
“But we didn’t see anything backing up.”
“It may have cleared spontaneously on its own after it siphoned the trap.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Wait and see if it happens again.”
“I thought you said it was dangerous.”
“It is. It can be. We’re going to keep all the windows open until we’ve diagnosed it.”
He regarded me and held my gaze as if to break it—thirty seconds; sixty. Then he laughed through his nose. “You’re not even going to ask me about it, are you?”
“About what?” I said.
“The girl’s underwear in my bathroom.”
I paused. I have since thought of a few better answers to this, like “I trust you,” or “You’re old enough to make your own choices,” but at the time what came to me was, “Not unless you want to talk to me about it, no.”
As we spoke, he’d been watching the smoke stream from the vent, and when I said this, he did an amazing thing. With both hands gripping the chimney crown, he stood and then leapt around it in the air. The fraction of time for which he hovered there, grounded only by his hands, was a long one, and the sound that came out of me was most similar to the bark of a small dog. I scrambled to the chimney and stood to reach out for him, and when he landed on the other side, his bare feet straddling the ridge cap, I was gripping his shoulders with whitened fingers. Our faces were so close that when he began, suddenly, to laugh, his breath was hot against my lips. I pulled him towards me, and he stepped cooperatively around the chimney.
We sat down and looked out over our neighborhood. I had to catch my breath. I raised my arms discreetly to let the breeze cool the damp part of my shirt. On the steaming surface of a swimming pool a neighbor kept hot year-round, the head of a pale bird dog bobbed earnestly after two children on a rubber raft. They called to it as they paddled away, goading it along. It went on this way, the dog paddling after until the children reached a wall at the deep end of the pool and pulled the raft out of the water. The dog scrambled against the wall, and the larger of the two children tugged on its collar until, in some way, their end was met, and they collapsed on the chilly lawn at the patio’s edge, grasping their thick towels around them. For a moment, I could not take my eyes from their rest. Something about it. Their bodies would leave sweet imprints in the grass.
“Well,” I said finally.
“Should we go inside?” he said.
“I think so.”
We turned towards the dormer, and he motioned me to go first. As I crouched to ease myself towards the window, he laughed again and touched my shoulder, and I turned to catch the look on his face.
He smiled at me. “I’ve never seen you do that before.”
“What would that be?” I said.
“Yelp.”
THAT NIGHT, LIZ SAT UP IN BED, LOOKING THROUGH ELLIOT’S high school face book and watching the local news. The aftershock had resuscitated all of the most absurd of the producers’ ideas: interviews with insurance underwriters, demonstrations of earthquake safety products. I stood beside the bed and looked down at the page of children’s faces. Elliot’s photograph was slightly blurry, as if he had noticed something off camera at the last moment, his eyes sliding to the right.
She said, “It sounded like he had fun today.”
“It did,” I said.
He had come home late again that night, this time with grass stains on his shirt from a game of touch football in their yard. Through questions about the rules and how teams had been chosen, she had drawn it out of him quickly: Belsky himself had not played.
She turned a page of the face book, but she glanced at me again, waiting, I suspected, for me to ask about the pictures she was seeking: Peggy maybe, or Tim. In the last month, her manner of interacting with me had changed. She had fewer questions, and although most of the time I believed that this was because she was finding the fulfillment I’d intended for her with more willing patients, a part of me worried that her conversational pauses and lingering gazes were “passive assistance” techniques she’d learned at the Crisis Center. The idea annoyed me, and this feeling towards her was so unfamiliar that each time it surfaced, I tried to dismiss it. But the next time our talk strayed to any topic that had preoccupied me, I found I could not shake the idea that I was the secret object of her eager, clinical pity.
Through the open windows, we heard a crash and clatter: our neighbor hefting a sack of garbage into the metal can by his garage, the sound as clear as if I were holding the lid open for him. He coughed. He inhaled sharply. In his room, through his own open windows, I thought, Elliot could hear this as well.
Liz said, “He really seems to get something out of his time at Tim’s house.”
She looked at me, and here I was meant, I could see, to ask what she thought that might be. So I did.
She said, “More kids. A hot tub.” She smiled. “The unfamiliar spectacle of parents fighting with each other.”
And I touched her hair in answer so she would not say more to comfort me.
I stepped into our closet to change for bed. Half of our hanging clothes were left open to the air, but I had enclosed a section at either end in a redwood cabinet lined with cedar to protect them from moths. We kept these cabinets closed, but the hot, dry smell of these panels still escaped them. It was a refreshing, but somehow tiring smell—one I savored when I entered but was always glad to leave. When Liz was pregnant with Elliot, she was sick in the evenings and said the smell of cedar settled her stomach. One day I came home and found her asleep on the carpeted floor, her head between open cabinet doors, and that night I moved the thin mattress from our sleeper sofa into the closet. We slept there every night until her second trimester.
When I came out again, the reporter had turned the news back over to the anchorman, a tall man with dark hair parted whitely. All that week, the last two minutes of news had been devoted to aftershock effects, and today he told the story of a school in Citrus Heights where two acoustical tiles had loosened and dropped from ceiling to desktop. I could picture these tiles: white, formed of mineral fiber, too light to do anything but surprise, but still the solemn description of the incident. The camera panned slowly across the ceiling to the hole where the tiles had been.
“Ha,” I said.
“More pseudo-calamity?” she said.
“Yes.”
When I slipped into bed, her body did not shift or rise. I was a restless sleeper, and years ago I’d purchased separate twin bed mattresses we bound together with a king-sized sheet to mitigate the disturbance caused by my turning, but lately her stillness when I moved seemed freighted with meaning, a blunt symbol in a simple movie. When we made love now, she was more athletic—a kind of compensation—but she no longer whispered. She was watching the news now, but I saw that while I dressed she had turned the face book to a picture of Tim. He stood somehow closer to the camera than the other students, so that his head was larger than those above and below it on the page.
“There’s also the driving,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
“Reasons for Elliot hanging out there instead of here.” She turned away from the TV screen to face me. “Riding around with Tim like that. Maybe he even lets Ellie drive.”
I had thought of this too, of course. It was illegal for a learner’s-permit holder to drive without an adult present, but I doubted this would matter to him.
I said, “I think he’ll probably take his test next month.”
“Do you think he’ll be ready?”
“I do.”
For my own driver’s test, I had taken my father’s service van to the DMV. He had not used it in months. My mother was with me, and after I got my license, I drove us along the turnpike all the way to the Lincoln Tunnel. Although the drive took more than an hour, she never once asked me where I was going or suggested we turn home. She was quiet next to me, but this wasn’t strange. Instead, I had the impression that she was in fact hoping I would drive farther—that her fate was in my hands. At the same time, I knew that were I to speak aloud the possibility of driving far or missing dinner with him, she would tell me to turn around that instant. Our freedom seemed fragile, predicated on not speaking, and so I did not acknowledge the strangeness of the accumulation of missed exits, or of the growing Manhattan skyline as we went around bends in the turnpike. There was never at any point in the drive any real possibility of leaving, but in our silence, I felt our mutual desire for it, and the unspoken fantasy I was sure we shared was the closest we had ever come to discussing our disappointment. It made my chest light. Only the terror of passing the narrow underwater lanes of the tunnel with all the nervous twitches of a new driver could begin to dispel this. Then the stoplight on Dyer Avenue, the sudden stillness among honking horns and buildings taller than any I had ever seen; it was a splash of cold water for us both. My mother smoothed the lap of her skirt. “The end of the line,” she said lightly; she smiled but could not look at me, and for this, it played like an epitaph for what we had just shared; “It’s time to go home.”
Liz shifted beneath her sheets, and her bare leg touched me. She smelled like soap. With the windows open, sound carried in the air above our yard to his room. It was an inhibition, but sadly it was not the only one.
“Will you want to go with him?” she said.
She meant to his driver’s test. Suddenly I did want to, very much, but courtesy had begun to curdle our exchanges. I said, “What about you?”
“Maybe we should both go.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
She drifted off quickly, but dozens of times that night I woke with a start to the thought of the seven gaping windows on the first floor with a kind of panic I had learned from my mother. Liz did not seem to share this. The few times Elliot had asked to spend nights at other boys’ houses, she’d said yes without even knowing where they lived. It was my job at night to close all our windows and set the burglar alarm, and on my rare business trips I would call before bed to find that in my absence she hadn’t bothered. I had built my staircase with a precision-routed stringer and a generous bead of construction adhesive to keep the treads from squeaking and then added a thick runner that muffled the impact of any passage. Through an open first-floor window, I thought, a man could make it into Elliot’s bedroom without notice. Under the shield of these night sounds, he could creep into my own room and put a knife to my wife’s throat while I slept.
On Monday morning, I called Pacific Security. For a twenty percent rush fee, the serviceman who came to measure our windows returned just a few days later with a full set of custom screens and interfaced each one with a short flexible cord to a contact on the sills. I drifted in and out of rooms where he worked, hoping he would finish before my wife and son got home. But he did not hurry. He took a stick of gum from his pocket and explained that the mesh was interlaced with thin wires that would detect cutting. He sat back and wiped his brow with a handkerchief from his back pocket; the sill contacts would detect removal, he said. Liz and Elliot both returned as he reprogrammed the keypad, paging slowly through a manual in our front hall. Then he tested it twice, filling the house with an urgent blaring while I stood behind him, oddly shamed by the noise. After he left, I went into the kitchen, where Liz stood at the sink washing lettuce for a salad, and Elliot sat at the table flipping through a magazine.
I felt the urge to reclaim something.
“There,” I said. “Now we can protect ourselves from gas poisoning AND prowlers.” When nobody laughed, I said, “We’ll just keep the windows open a couple more weeks as a precaution.”
Elliot turned a page, but I could tell he was listening. I said, “Then, if it doesn’t recur, I think we can safely assume the smell was caused by a temporary clog.”
I STILL THINK IT’S ODD THAT I DIDN’T ANTICIPATE WHAT happened next. I was at my desk in my vast new office, trying to make sense of a junior engineer’s rambling memo about the pedestal design for Bottlerock, when my telephone rang.
“Luther, hi. It’s Sylvia de Silva.”
I couldn’t place her name, but it sounded vaguely familiar, and I didn’t want to insult her: “Yes,” I said. “Hello.”
“You were the designer for North Fork, right?”
I rarely interacted with anyone outside the engineering group, and at that point, I figured she was an administrator of some sort. Or someone in Accounting. Belsky had just submitted a proposal for budgeting on some new tests. “I managed the design, yes.”
“And you’re doing the investigation?”
“Robert Belsky’s doing most of the work, but I’m supporting it.”
There was a small pause. Then: “So, how’s it going?”
“Fine.”
“No problems?”
I heard a leaf of paper turn on her desk and a distant telephone ringing. Belsky hadn’t mentioned a particular person in Accounting, and at that moment I found I couldn’t remember the names of anyone in that department at all.
I said, “What sort of problems?”
“Glitches. Surprises of any sort.”
“No.”
“Really?”
I heard another page turn, and then another telephone. Then a third began ringing in concert with the second: not the soft warble of the incomprehensible new-fangled system we used inside the Department, I finally noticed. There was a slight rustle, and the sounds of the telephones became muffled.
“Sylvia, I’m sorry, we’ve probably met, but I don’t remember.”
“Oh, gee, I’m the one who should be sorry,” she said. “I thought you’d recognize my name. I’m a reporter for the Sacramento Bee.”
What I felt first was irritation at not anticipating what immediately seemed to have been an obvious and inevitable development. Quickly, however, my shame was displaced by anger. “You thought I’d recognize your name?”
“Yeah.”
“How long have you been reporting on water allocation?”
“I’ve done several stories.”
“Then you must know that there are two spokespeople for the Department of Water Resources, and I’m neither of them.”
It is of course in the best interests of a reporter not to register surprise or allow awkwardness to creep into her manner, and she took this in her stride. I thought I heard the pop and pressurized release of a soda can opening. “Hunh. No, I wasn’t aware. I just thought people would like to hear your perspective on things.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I thought they’d be curious to know whether you thought it was necessary—whether your dam was sound or needed a little shoring up.”
“Have you got a pen?”
“Yeah, sure.” It was more difficult, then, for her to mask her excitement. I heard a rustling again, and then a thump. The conversation had taken an early turn that made her believe I’d say nothing of value, and now it had changed. “Go ahead.”
I cleared my throat and coughed. “Excuse me, I’m a little congested.”
“That’s okay.”
“My wife thinks it’s a cold, but I think it could be a mold allergy.”
“That’s too bad.”
I coughed again. “Well,” I said. “Where was I?”
“You wanted me to write something down.”
“Oh, right. Are you ready?”
“Yes.” Her impatience was gratifying.
“Leonard Berkman and Christine White.”
“Okay.” There was a pause while she wrote this down. “Who are they?”
I looked out my window at the capitol dome. Then I said, “They’re the spokespeople for the Department,” and I hung up the phone.
Although it was winter, my new office had so many windows that, by late morning, the room began to overheat. The sun warmed my neck and shirt back and drew odors from the room, and now I was overwhelmed, suddenly, by the smell of banana. Liz sent me to the office each day with a little cooler. She always put a piece of whole fruit inside, which I ate at my desk feeling lucky, but now I bent over my garbage can to find the peel. It was cool and dry, and when I pinched it between my fingers, the vein-work on the inner walls gave and slid and released more of that smell.
The air by Elena’s desk was oddly refreshing. The faint scents there were discernible to me in some heightened state of sensitivity: hair spray and hot pencil erasers. She made a lot of mistakes, and walked around the office with a telltale dusting of the pink-black rubber filings clinging to the lap of her acetate skirts. The air felt cooler, too, and the noise of typewriters and telephones was welcome. I went to the kitchenette, where a secretary I didn’t recognize was heating a container of leftovers in the microwave. She was humming “The Girl from Ipanema,” and her anonymous company was somehow soothing. I dropped the banana peel in the garbage can and stepped to the window. I rested a hand on the cold steel sill. On the sidewalk below, a mother was attempting to pull a tandem stroller up over the curb. She might have loaded them into it on the sidewalk, or wheeled it along to the corner where the Architectural Barriers Act required the curb to thin and meet the asphalt, but instead, this struggle. Behind me, the microwave pinged, and the secretary stopped her humming abruptly. The door chucked open, and she said “Voilà” and walked out with her lunch.
I went down the hall and popped my head in Belsky’s doorway. “I just wanted to warn you about something,” I said.
He was eating a doughnut, and he raised his eyebrows in a way that called attention to the connotations of reprimand my opener carried. I saw that I should have led with something else: a question about Tim, or another expression of false gratitude for the hospitality he and Joyce were showing my son. But it was too late for that now.
I said, “A reporter just called me from the Bee. She tried to pretend she was someone I knew to get me to talk about the investigation, but I figured it out before I gave her any comment. Her name is Sylvia de Silva.”
Standing on my front doorstep to pick up Elliot for water-skiing that first time, he had eyed my house, up and down. Sometimes I thought of this as meaningful, but other times he was just any man on a doorstep. I tried to remind myself that his offer to take Elliot had been a joke.
I said, “I just wanted you to know who she is. You know—in case she calls you.”
As I finished my last sentence, he took another bite, and he regarded me while he chewed. When he swallowed, he said, “Thanks.”
He crumpled his napkin into a ball and then set his hands above his right shoulder. He flicked his wrist and it sailed past me towards his waste can where it landed on the floor next to another.
“For the warning,” he added.
Then he looked out the window at the rooftop garage next door.
My pulse quickened. It was unclear whether he intended that I leave.
Before I could decide, he said: “That blue Celica’s been parked in that same spot for a month.”
On the other side of the door, his secretary’s phone rang. He turned back towards me and smiled slightly, waiting for me to comment, but there was no response to this he could not make light of. He knew this. When it had been just long enough to make my speechlessness clear, he winked and said, “I know, because Krepps gave me the better view of the parking lot.”
THE EVENING MIGHT HAVE GONE DIFFERENTLY IF I HAD BEEN A better predictor, at this point, of what my son would do, but in that respect I think it is clear that I had never had much intuition. I had guessed that he would have pointed questions about my story. So on the way home, tapping the brake pedal in traffic, I had rehearsed answers to these. Then, because I wanted to afford it as little importance as possible, I told them in the kitchen. Liz was generally garrulous, I had noticed, when she came home from the Crisis Center: a little flushed and talking fast and quick to laugh. Counting on this, I did not do it as soon as I arrived home, but instead waited until she finished a story of how she had gone to her hairdresser to touch up Peggy’s cut and he had not recognized her.
Maybe things went worse because of how entering upon this simple exchange unsettled me. Liz was in the kitchen unwrapping barbecue sandwiches onto our plates. She was only a few sentences into her story, but somehow my small sense of being a bystander in my own kitchen was magnified by the memory of my disorientation the night of her haircut, and the way the quality of Elliot’s attention made me imagine that he and Liz had talked about Peggy since then, maybe even about that underwear, and that if I was right about this Liz had not even tried to share her knowledge with me. I set my briefcase down and took off my suit coat in a weak attempt both to busy myself and to bridge the gap between us, and Liz, in a gesture of courtesy that was at once kind and surprisingly sad, turned a little to include me.
“He was giving me directions to a place called Counter Culture Cuts when I said, ‘Danny, it’s me, Liz,’ and he almost poked his customer in the cheek with his scissors he was so surprised. He asked all the other stylists over to look at me, and then he told me he could shape it into a soft Dorothy-Hamill-kind-of-thing.”
Elliot snorted, and she laughed with him.
She said, “He was flipping through a magazine to show me pictures before I could explain that I liked it. I said, ‘You’re like a small-town barber with your don’t-worry-we-can-fix-its. I just want you to touch it up. I actually want to keep this same cut.’”
Elliot laughed again, but his eyes shifted towards me, and in hindsight it is sweet I suppose, that his sense of my outsider status made him uncomfortable. But to dispel the awkwardness of this, I said, “Something funny happened to me today too. A reporter called to try to get me to say something interesting about the investigation for an earthquake scare piece. It was like something from a spy movie. She tried to pretend to be somebody I knew.”
Liz’s eyes grew wide for less than a second. This was worse. Elliot picked a slice of sweet pickle from his plate and popped it in his mouth. Through the open window, we heard an airplane pass overhead. I picked up my plate. “I didn’t fall for it, of course.”
Liz said, “What did you tell her?”
“I told her to get her pen ready, and then I gave her the names of the spokespeople.”
“I love it,” she said.
We set our plates on the kitchen table. It was damp out, and this made it feel colder than it was. Liz was wearing two sweaters. I slid the window halfway shut, and, as I sat down to eat, I imagined Elliot was ticking through his options. Did it make you angry? Why didn’t you tell her what you thought? He watched Liz lift her fork and then he cut a piece of brisket and put it in his mouth. Just as I was marveling that he was not saying anything to heighten my discomfort, he said, “So, did you ever think of an answer?”
“Sure, but the point is she’s supposed to talk to the spokespeople.”
“No,” he said. “Not about that. For that last question for my report.”
“What question?” Liz said.
I said, “A time when my father scared me.”
I still have not sorted out how much of what he did that year was natural, and how much of it was calculated to unseat me with surprise. He took another bite of brisket and watched me as he chewed.
In the last few days, the truth was I had thought a number of times about his question, and what kept coming to me was the night my father came home and announced that he had been fired.
“Well, they’re foolish,” my mother had said. She slipped on her oven mitts. “They don’t know what they’re losing.”
My father had always been prone to quick irritation, and at first the rise in his voice when he spoke next didn’t really strike me as strange. “I got fired because I messed up, Lucille.”
She dismissed the idea with a mitted hand.
He said, “I mouthed off like I always do. I’ve got a big mouth, and it finally got me into trouble.”
“You’re one of his best plumbers.”
“His best plumbers don’t tell off his customers.”
She pulled the pot roast from the oven, and when she set it on the stove, he turned her with both hands and took her oven mitts off. He held on to her hands, but low, close to the wrists, and in his eyes there was something beseeching. “How come everything I do gets the same reaction from you? How about if I socked a customer in the nose? How about if I threatened my boss? How about if I ran over Luther with my van?” Their faces were close, and she looked as confused as I was by this flash of desperation, something altogether different than his anger. “I lost my job, Lucille.”
“I know.”
“So what are you going to do now I don’t get paid every Friday?”
“Serve less pot roast,” she said.
“Serve less pot roast.” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “What’ll you feed Luther if I don’t get a job?”
“You will. You’re ten times the brain of anyone you’ve worked with. You should start your own outfit.”
“It takes time to drum up clients. Especially if you’re a jerk.”
“So?”
“So what’ll you put on the table till then?”
She smiled. “Eggs, potatoes, and apples.”
Somehow instead of appreciating her faith and good humor, he received this easy specificity like a slap. He let her hands fall. If his frustration was hurtful to her, she chose not to show it. She smiled again and kissed him on the forehead. She was taller than him, and prone to gestures, I see now, that made him feel it.
Of course, it was only in hindsight that I was able to recognize this conversation as the catalyst that it was. It seemed to me that there had always been an underlying self-hatred in my father, latent in his temper and his slavery to impulse, which at first drew him to a long-suffering love like my mother’s but was ultimately bound to question it. Sitting at my dinner table with my wife and son, I suppose it is telling that after the initial fear this analysis always stirred in me, I felt the silent rise of a pulse-pounding outrage: not at the weakness behind my father’s insecurity, but at his selfish failure to hide it—the first step along a slippery slope that would give him license to test her over and over with ever-greater assaults on her love. Elliot might be doing the same to me, I admitted—I did understand that—but, unlike my father, he deserved not my anger but my patience. He was only a child, and besides, with one lapse in the attic I had given him reason to doubt the honesty of my emotions.
Across the table, he was watching me. I picked up my napkin and made a business of wiping my lips.
“No,” I said finally. “I didn’t think of anything.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE FIRST, OF COURSE. OUR BEDROOM smelled of damp grass and my nose was cold, and so my first thought was not of the newspaper, but of the sewer gas. But it didn’t take long to remember. I put on a sweatshirt and went outside.
Ms. de Silva got front-page placement, and the headline was worse than I’d imagined: “Earthquake Risk: Dam Failure Could Flood Sacramento.” The Bee is a decent paper, but they fall prey to the same temptations other papers do. They printed a bar graph showing the size of earthquakes in California over the last one hundred years. The November earthquake was a 6.8. The El Centro earthquake of 1940, which had killed nine people and caused six million dollars in damage, had been a 7.1. The 1906, which was the most famous earthquake in history and may have killed as many as three thousand, was an 8.3. And to the right of these, a bar showing a 7.8 earthquake labeled, “Magnitude that would rupture North Fork Dam, flooding most of Sacramento County.” The editors made no effort to point out that an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 is actually ten times larger than a 6.8, or that the epicenter would have to be within twenty-five miles of the dam to have this ominous effect, almost inconceivable given the fault patterns in the area. More irritating still was a box to the left of the article titled, “What You Can Do to Protect Your Family,” and a list, including purchasing flood insurance, stocking up on emergency supplies, and writing to your local legislators urging more stringent safety requirements. Of course, Ms. de Silva fanned these flames with quotes from uninformed people. Mothers and fathers said, “Terrifying” and “How do things like this get approved?” The mayor, who has virtually no influence over state politics or interactions with the Department of Water Resources but was facing stiff reelection competition said, “I will take any measure to protect the safety of the citizens of Sacramento.”
As I read, I kept bracing myself. I imagined Belsky would have offered to talk to her only as an unnamed employee—a quote implying serious danger or embarrassment to the Department—but the only comment from within our division was from Leonard Berkman, and Ms. de Silva twisted it to her purposes: “In the face of scrutiny, criticism, and fear,” she wrote, “the DWR would comment only in vague terms through a professional spokesperson who said: ‘A very likely outcome of the investigation is greater confidence that North Fork is one of the safest dams in the country.’ In the meantime, the citizens of Sacramento will have to hope that the aftershocks are over.”
Liz snorted at the amateur melodrama and tabloid partiality of this line, as I’d hoped she would, and kissed me on the crown of my head as she read it over my shoulder, but Elliot merely set it down when he finished, and it was somehow more disturbing to me that instead of challenging me with a question he merely returned to reading Road & Track. At the time I attributed my anxiety to a worry that he was biding his time for a surprise attack of some kind, but the feeling I had was more hollow than that. It’s as if briefly some stunted part of me understood that the testing he’d been doing was at least a sign of interest, or a sign that he had higher expectations for me, and that this resignation, or indifference, or both, while less obviously hostile, was a lesser kind of love.
The reactions from my coworkers were more gratifying. On my desk that morning was a white-frosted Danish like the ones I often saw Elena eating with a knife and fork at her desk. Leonard stopped me in the men’s room to laugh about the way Sylvia de Silva had called him for comment from a pay phone at an A&P at five-thirty and told him there was no time to research his answers. When I went to the lobby to buy a can of soda, I returned to find a stainless steel spaghetti strainer on my chair with a note attached in Belsky’s cramped hand: “Safety of Dams asked me to collect any early models you might have constructed of North Fork. I hear there’s one that looks something like this,” a typical dig, but one laced with some empathy nonetheless. At noon, Ken Gonzales stopped by my office to ask me out to lunch. I told him I planned to eat at my desk, and he rapped twice on my doorjamb and said he hoped I wasn’t letting the article get to me.
When lunchtime came, though, I went not to the deli downstairs, but instead to a store on Sunrise Boulevard whose sequined aquamarine marquee had burned itself into my memory in the sharp five o’clock afterlight of thousands of commutes home. I wish I could describe or even remember the exact quality of the feeling that overcame me when I did such things. It was not a strong drive or a panic or even a despair. It was a blankness, a kind of hollow nothing that must have been conjured through force of some will but over time had become like a reflex. Sometimes a generalized sadness or a quick flare of self-loathing would rise, but it never lasted very long. The salesman descended on me at the door with an assault of questions and a gambler’s hand of glossy brochures, but the truth was any model would do, as long as it could be delivered that afternoon.
By then Liz had had long experience with my surprise purchases, and even as distracted as she was those days, I suppose there was a strong enough plea implicit in the pattern to get her attention. She tried to give me what I wanted. That evening, although it was only sixty degrees, she met me in the driveway wearing a sarong from a trip to Mexico over her sky-blue tank suit. She had set up dinner at our garden table and a boom box playing Spanish music on the brown, new-smelling vinyl cover of the hot tub. She sashayed to me and bumped her hip against mine.
“How long have you been planning this?” she said.
I shrugged and smiled.
“Fifteen jets!” she said. “He can invite half his class from school.”
She threw a shawl over her shoulders against the chill and served sangria to all three of us and did not raise her eyebrows when Elliot poured himself more. I had several topics in reserve, but she did not let the subject stray from our new acquisition. She floated half-a-dozen ideas for parties around the hot tub, and Elliot entertained these gracefully, with a kind of eye rolling and smiling that from a teenager reveals a grudging affection.
Over slices of pound cake, finally, I shared my coworkers’ reactions to the article with my wife and son. Liz lifted the lid for a dip in the hot tub, but of course the water inside was still very cold, and to salvage some of the spirit she’d intended, she led us across the lawn and slipped off her shoes to stand ankle-deep on the top step of our pool. She goaded me along with easy questions and lighthearted comments, and abandoned her plate to eat the slice of cake from her hand. Elliot was quiet. He sat on the copingstones with his feet next to Liz’s in the water and passed pieces of cake between his lips at those moments when he might have been expected to weigh in with a comment of his own, leaving Liz to construct a lean-to of comfort without the support of his ease and humor. The sun kept setting, until the pool was dark above their feet, their ankles disappearing beneath the glassy surface, and I wished I had set the underwater light on a timer that matched the earlier nightfall of the new season, a task I had somehow let slip, despite my vigilance.