IN FEBRUARY OF THAT YEAR, THE WEATHER CHANGED. THE RAINS subsided. The fog burned off and temperatures reached a record eighty degrees. At first people were wary, but in the second week of this, some removed the covers from their swimming pools. Drugstores displayed sunscreen near the cash registers, picnic blankets dotted Capitol Park, and, one afternoon, my wife knocked at my office door in a yellow sundress with a Thermos full of lemonade and a sack of sandwiches from the barbecue restaurant. She pulled one of my guest chairs around to my side of the desk, reached into the bag, and handed me a warm, damp bundle of waxed paper. “Happy heat wave!” she said, and she kissed me on the cheek.
Although I have come to think this was just an uncomplicated romantic gesture—a reaction to the same foretaste of loss I myself was feeling—at the time, I was instantly suspicious. Ms. de Silva’s article, of course, had not been the last mention in the paper about my dam. The following day there had been an impassioned editorial, and from this, two camps had quickly emerged: those who felt it was a large waste of money to consider structural modifications, and those who feared the dam would fail and wash away our city during the next tremor. Sometimes Liz read these articles and letters aloud at breakfast with a mocking tone, but with her new daytime hours she was often in too much of a hurry to mention them at all, and it is at least some sign of feeling on my part that I was conflicted about this. Occasionally I registered it as a loss (although more out of nostalgia than out of an understanding that something important was changing). But more frequently I vacillated between relief at the waning of her sympathetic scrutiny and worry that the silence was merely some kind of passive-aggressive technique she had devised in the dead time between calls at the Crisis Center.
I think I knew even then that there was something destructive about my suspicion, and I tried to dispel it as I chewed, but each time I focused my attention successfully on what she was saying—about the tenderness of the brisket, or the jets in the new hot tub, or a profile she’d read on Sally Ride—a wave of bitter astonishment invaded my thoughts. How did we get here? I was struggling with this when Belsky waved at us through the hall window. He opened the door and held up a can of Sprite. “Well, well. Lookee here. I had intended this for my partner in crime, but I’d much rather give it to a lady,” he said. “Nice haircut, by the way. A whole new you.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well. Thanks.” She touched herself at the nape, but looked at the carpet. She was always a little uncomfortable when other men flirted with her in front of me, but her discomfort when Belsky did it seemed to be growing stronger. I tried to assure myself that this was because she shared my dislike of him, and not because she felt it would be a blow to my ego to see that a man who had built rapport so easily with our son could do so with her as well.
He popped a can open and handed it to her. He licked a drop of Sprite from his finger and leaned on the edge of my desk, facing her. “Your son is a great kid.”
“He really enjoys Tim.”
“Polite, personable, great laugh.”
“It’s sweet of you and Joyce to host him so often.”
“All that and a great mother too.” He shook his head. Then he turned a little to look at me. “I just came by to get any notes on tests you didn’t submit to the files.”
“You asked me for those last week.”
“Did I?” he said, scratching his head.
“Three times, in fact.” I laughed to diffuse the irritation I felt. “Once in a memo, once in the middle of a staff meeting, and once in line at the cafeteria toaster. I gave you everything I have.”
“You only did fifteen core samples?”
“That’s right.”
“Come on.” He looked at Liz. “Does that sound right to you? Fifteen core samples. I think he’s hiding something.”
I said, “I think you stopped by to see my wife.”
Both of them looked at me. Belsky raised his eyebrows, but he was caught short, I think, by the truth of it. Liz’s eyes moved minutely around my face, for clues.
I picked up the Sprite he had given Liz and sipped it. I had been too harsh, I thought. He was just a coarse man, and he meant me no harm. The interest he had taken in my son was at my request, and for whatever reason even seemed to be good for him. I said, “I can sympathize with the impulse, but I’d like her all to myself.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said, and stood up. “But we’re having a party Saturday—a barbecue if the weather holds. Maybe you could share her then—bring Elliot and join us.”
Liz did not wait for me to hesitate on this.
“We’d love to,” she said.
As he walked out, Elena poked her head in to remind me that I had a meeting, and by lingering in the room to pull files as Liz gathered her things, she robbed me of any chance to joke with my wife about what had just happened. I expected her to mention Belsky’s visit as soon as we were alone in the bedroom that night, and when she didn’t, a dread began to build inside me. I waited to see what she would do, and listened with wonder as she talked about the strange heat wave, and the way it was bringing out buds on the China plum, keeping up the conversation when it flagged, and all the while leaving the topic glinting in the corner of the bedroom untouched.
It is ironic that Howard chose the following morning to visit my office unannounced. He laid a trembling hand on my guest chair and raised his eyebrows, his request for an invitation to sit. He was an engineer who had been promoted into a position that was almost entirely interpersonal in nature, and, over the years, he had adapted himself to it as best he could. He always began impromptu encounters with a series of social questions that through tireless repetition in the halls and elevators had formed the unlikely foundation of his popularity. In the context of his power, his awkwardness was somehow endearing.
Predictably, he picked up the photograph on my desk. “Beautiful family,” he said, as if looking at it for the first time.
“Thank you.”
He set the picture down. “How’s Liz?”
“Great,” I said. “She’s working at the Crisis Center now.”
“Crisis Center, eh?” His eyes strayed to his notepad. He looked up again. “And that house of yours?”
“Terrific.”
“Built it from scratch yourself, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Impressive.”
“Thanks.”
He looked at his paper again. “Well, Luther. You’ve probably heard Don’s retiring.”
“Yes. I’m sorry for the Department, but happy for him. I’m sure Lorraine will like seeing more of him.”
He smiled, but a muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. My response had interrupted his rhythm. He glanced at his notepad and pressed on. “And I just want you to know that the way this investigation is going had a lot to do with our decision on filling his post.”
He sat back in his chair, relieved to have finally set the meeting on its irrevocable course. The air conditioner ticked on, and I felt a pulse in my stomach, like a tiny hand tapping. I cocked my head slightly to encourage elaboration, but he said nothing. I said, “I’m not sure I understand.”
He trilled his shaking fingers on the plastic chair arm, smiling slightly, hopeful that I meant this rhetorically—that he would not have to begin again. “Sure you do.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Come on, Luther.” He was looking at his notepad, eager to move forward to his next point.
I said, “But so many have been investigated.”
“None like yours.”
The pulse in my stomach quickened. I said, “If you’re going to start letting the press dictate your promotions, I don’t think you’ll be happy with the results.”
I took a Kleenex from the box on my desk and wiped my forehead. There was no use now trying to conceal my agitation. I did not look at him directly, but I could tell he was holding very still. When I looked up, he looked down at his notes to afford me an awkward privacy.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Well, no, that’s—”
“I didn’t mean to lose my temper.”
“Oh, well…”
He picked up my photograph, lost in his routine, and then set it down clattering on my desktop. He ran a palm across his pant leg. “You’re not tracking me here, Luther. That’s the thing.” He skimmed his pant leg again and then settled his hands on the chair arms. “You’ve impressed us with the way you’re taking the investigation. Most of the guys lose their cool at least once anyway, and then Robert is no picnic to work with. Plus all that business in the papers.”
I must have looked confused, because at this point he laughed. He said, “We’d like you to take Don’s post.”
Although my failures of intuition that month were numerous, in a way the next one strikes me as the most pathetic. I was incredibly excited, as if there was some kind of magic in my news. I bought a bottle of champagne on the way home in anticipation of the ease it would rekindle among us, but in the end the moment of telling my wife and son about my promotion was not all that different from the one three weeks earlier when I had told them about the call from the reporter, with forced exclamations of pride from Liz and a silence from Elliot that could have expressed either indifference or judgment. And although the evening before she had neatly avoided it, that night in bed Liz introduced the topic of Belsky’s party with an analytical relish that showed me she had been thinking about it all along. She wanted to know if I’d seen Robert since Krepps talked to me about my promotion, and I told her I had not. Robert and Joyce would probably feel a little threatened, she said, and she recommended we try to ease this as best we could. Especially in light of their difficult marriage because things like this can add to the strain. “We could bring up how nice their house is,” she suggested. “I’ll bet the fact that they can afford such an expensive house is a big point of pride with a guy like him. Talking about it might make them feel less awkward.” I conceded that this was true, but as she talked, I could not shake the idea that her work at the Crisis Center had made her cagey enough to architect an entire conversation about how to ease Belsky’s competitive feelings simply in order to assuage my own.
Although of course I agreed with her, already my thoughts were turning to the party with an eagerness that in retrospect seems foolish. It had been over two months now since he had taken Elliot water-skiing, and since then Elliot’s attachment to his family had grown until he spent almost as many waking hours underneath their roof as he did under ours.
Liz said, “And if he’s insensitive to Joyce, we have to build her up somehow. Maybe he does it out of feelings of inadequacy,” and again I felt that rise of suspicion. I pictured a pale-fingered social worker reading to a class of volunteers from a textbook, Liz nodding, taking notes.
THAT MY SON WAS QUIET IN THE CAR ON THE WAY TO THE barbecue should not have seemed a rebuke in the context of the recent changes, but as we glided along the wide sapling-lined streets of the Sunrise Villas, I felt my palms begin to sweat on the wheel. When Elliot was eight, the parents of boys at his school had entered a sort of birthday party arms race. He went to events at which he rode in a real fire engine, swam with dolphins, and bounced in someone’s backyard in an inflatable room the size of a one-car garage. He came back from each glassy-eyed with sugar and an awe for the fathers of these boys that had me worrying about his own birthday party seven months in advance. At a certain point, without really examining the implications of what I was doing, I began to interview purveyors of entertainment. I met with a juggler who worked a heavy measure of realistic self-injury gags into his routine, a falconer with trained birds of prey he taught children to call to their mitted arms with scraps of raw beef, and finally a magician. Each time, I took them to our yard where Liz couldn’t hear us because I was vaguely embarrassed by the overseriousness of my project, and near the trunk of our elm tree, I asked them to tell me about their routines. The juggler and the falconer both gave me a businesslike description of services, breaking their programs down into increments of time, and specifying exactly how each of the children would get to participate. But the magician simply told me he’d bring equipment for all thirty of his most popular tricks and do ten he chose based on the vague measure of “audience response.” I asked him what he meant.
“After the first trick for any group,” he said, “you can see in their eyes what they want more of. Do they want the pure surprise of a rabbit from a hat, or to have their cynicism snuffed by helping with a card trick they thought they could figure, or to feel a scary mix of empathy and brutality bubble up while they watch a friend trust me with knives?” He sipped his 7-Up. He was wearing a cable-knit sweater, but he had a handlebar mustache that helped me to picture it. He said, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I’ll tell you there’s still nothing like it.”
“Like what?” I said.
“The joy of surprising them with what they want.”
When the boys were cross-legged in the grass, he had appeared, not from the kitchen door, but from the limb of a tree above them. He was wearing a cape with a collar that stood up, which I would have guessed would strike a lame note with boys that age, but there was something about the shock of his descent from the tree that earned their respect before he had even done any magic. They were alternately slack-jawed and laughing the kind of wide-eyed, gasping laugh that signals amusement not at the humor of a performer but at the improbability of the feelings he has managed to stir inside them. When the show was over, he asked if they had any questions, and, as I’m sure he predicted, the first was about the methods behind a certain trick. He nodded gravely and asked them to come close, and they stumbled over one another for position.
He took out his deck of cards and fanned them out, faceup. “I start with them spread like this, see? Then I turn the fan over, like this, to show you their backs, and when I flip them over again, that’s where the gimmick comes in,” he said. He paused here, and by doing so, allowed me to feel the tension he’d produced. The boys’ eyes did not stray from the cards or his hands. When he flipped them back, finally, all of the cards were blank. “Shucks,” he said, “I guess I’ll have to show you another time,” and what I saw on every boy’s face was not irritation but a kind of relief. The magician closed the deck, smiling.
For almost a month after the party, Elliot had sat at tables with a deck of cards. He checked out a book at the library. He spent his allowance on a kit that came with a set of metal rings and a wand, and he wore its dark cape. I was no longer envious of the fathers who had planned his friends’ parties, but something worse had replaced it. One night Liz found me by the living room window thumbing through the book of tricks he’d left on the coffee table. She kissed me on the cheek. “He thrilled him, I won’t argue you on that, but try to keep it in perspective,” she said. “It’s infatuation. Nobody can develop real love for a man in a cape. Not even a boy.”
Belsky’s house looked different finished, and in the light of day. Although I’ll admit I’d been curious, I had resisted the small temptation to drive by after Belsky told me they’d moved in. I suspected Liz herself had given in to the urge, but still she commented on how nice it looked as if she were seeing it for the first time. It was apparent now, in the way that it had not been to me in the dark, that this was one of the largest of the lots, more private from the neighbors and with a better vantage of the golf course and the lake on the ninth hole, and that the window above the door was taller than two stories—more like twenty-five feet.
“We just go around back,” Elliot said.
“We should at least ring the doorbell,” I said.
But he had already started across the lawn. By the time we rounded the south wall behind him, he had stripped off his shirt and shoes and was moving through the crowd. A brawny man running to fat threw a football to a group of boys. A girl in a bikini pushed a baby on an old metal swing set. A dozen children bobbed up and down in the massive swimming pool. Elliot ran toward it. “Fish out of water!” he yelled, and grabbed his knees to his chest as he sailed out over its middle. Then another boy, whom I thought I recognized from the face book as Tim, jumped on his head and crushed him under the surface. They came up laughing. A girl pierced the surface and spat a stream of pool water in Elliot’s face. He filled his mouth to return fire, and only when she raised her hands—a-glint with silver rings—to defend herself, did I recognize her as Peggy. I was so stunned by the whole scene, I didn’t notice Joyce sidling up beside us.
“Well, hello,” she said. She waved in the direction of the smoking barbecue. “Bob, they’re here!”
He waved a spatula to disperse the smoke. “Hey! I thought you’d be hobnobbing with a senator or something.”
“Congratulations,” Joyce said, and she kissed me on the cheek.
He stuck a finger in the sauce and tasted it. “Needs more of the fancy mustard.”
“We’re out of fancy,” Joyce said. “We only have yellow.”
“What would your dad think?”
“He wouldn’t think anything.”
He turned to me. “Joyce’s dad is a kingpin.”
“That makes him sound like mafia, Bob.” She looked at me. “He was a nylon manufacturer.”
“The nylon mafia.”
She rolled her eyes.
He said, “This house was a twentieth-anniversary present, if you can believe it.”
“How generous,” Liz said.
“No kidding. He wasn’t even embarrassed when she married me.”
“Stop it,” Joyce said. “He wasn’t embarrassed at all.”
“He said, ‘At least you didn’t pick a deadbeat dad.’”
“That is absolutely not what he said, Bob. He said, ‘You picked a good father for my grandchildren, Joyce. It took me fifty years to figure out that nylon wasn’t important. I’m glad he doesn’t care about striking it rich.’ Those were his exact words. He wishes he were more like you.” She tilted her chin up with pride.
“Of course he does,” he said. “He can’t do this, for instance,” and he put his hand up under his T-shirt. He pumped his free arm and made a flatulent sound you could have heard from the street. From all points in the yard, this triggered a familiar braying laughter that could only have been his children. Two ran at him from either side and leaped at his back, and somehow he caught them both around the waist so that he held them like footballs. He started spinning in place, and his children bucked and laughed under his arms and screamed “Stop! Stop!” When he finally did, one of them threw up on his apron and started to cry.
“Damn it, Joyce!” he said.
“What did I do!?” She picked up the boy and stroked his hair.
“Stevie threw up again!”
“I see that!”
“What are you letting him play and eat barbecue for, for Christ’s sake?”
“He’s not sick, you spun him on a stomachful of hot dogs.”
“He throws up holding perfectly still all the time.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. She pressed Stevie to her chest and strode toward the house. Robert took off his apron and held it up for me to see. “Jesus,” he said. He crossed the lawn and went in a sliding-glass door as she passed through French doors at the opposite end of the sprawling house. Although we were suddenly alone, for a moment neither Liz nor I said anything. Behind us there were splashing sounds from the pool; the slap of a caught football; shrieks of children—an unfamiliar two or three, and then our son’s. We kept our eyes on the doors Robert and Joyce had passed through. At some point Liz made herself say, “Wow,” and I responded with, “Yeah,” but it was not clear from this what exactly had surprised us, and although I suspect she had intended, as I did, to adopt a tone of superior amusement, the truth was that somehow, despite the fact that we had clearly just witnessed a domestic dispute, my predominant feeling was one of inadequacy.
Robert returned first, wearing a white lace-trimmed apron and carrying a tall glass of scotch. He held it up to us, smiling, and took a sip. “Time to get some more of these babies on the fire,” he said, and he took the tinfoil off a platter of raw hamburger patties. As he set them on the grill, they sizzled fiercely.
When Joyce came back, she was wearing a UC Davis sweatshirt and Stevie was wearing a pair of He-Man pajamas. She winked at us and stood next to her husband in a cloud of barbecue smoke. Stevie stared at me from behind his sucked thumb until I looked at the grass.
Robert said, “I’m ignoring you.”
Joyce grinned and said, “Good, I’m ignoring you too.”
Stevie pointed at the grill and said, “That one’s not getting any fire, Daddy.”
“Thanks, Chief.” He moved a patty toward the center. “How do you feel?”
“Okay.”
Now Joyce leaned to kiss Robert and noticed his apron. She reared back. “Well, don’t you look sweet!”
“Mine had Steve’s puke on it.”
“I have to get a picture.” She set Stevie down, and he ran off toward a sandpile, stopping midway across the lawn to put his hands on his hips in a muscular stance and admire the lay of his pajamas. Then he kept on running. Joyce took an Instamatic from the pocket of her sweatshirt and held it with her finger over the viewfinder in one hand and her drink in the other.
“Curtsey for me,” she said.
Robert held one corner of the apron out between pinched fingers and did a deep plié.
“Wait,” she said, “I can’t see the frilly bottom.” She backed up a step and he curtsied again.
“Wait, wait,” she said.
“Christ, Joyce.”
Then she backed up another step and fell into the swimming pool. The splash was huge. When the water cleared, we could see Joyce’s drink hand above the surface. Her head bobbed up and she drew the camera out of the water and set it on the side of the pool, laughing.
Robert cupped his hands around his mouth like a megaphone. “’Least you saved your drink!”
She set her drink on the poolside and hooked an elbow over the copingstones. Her thick sweatshirt was dark with water, and she could not stop laughing. Here and there on the lawn people clapped and shouted catcalls. Little children in pajamas jumped up and down at the sight. Elliot stood dripping on the side of the pool between Peggy and Tim, his face wide-eyed and smiling in unself-conscious delight such as I had not seen grace him in over a year. Liz stepped to my side and watched with me as Robert leaned over, his heavy waist peeking out from under his T-shirt, and took both of his wife’s hands. He hoisted her out, and somehow I knew before he did it that when he got her up on the patio, he would hug her soaking body against his own.
EVERY YEAR, SACRAMENTO IS BESET BY RAINSTORMS. PARKING lots become reflecting pools, and people cross downtown streets in the center of blocks to avoid gutter puddles deep enough to flood their pant cuffs. Without an umbrella, a rush to a waiting car will soak one’s suit jacket through to the skin. The rivers overflow and eat away at their own banks, so that when people go to sell their properties years later, they’re surprised by the loss of acreage they have suffered.
The last two weeks of the February of 1983 were particulary wet ones. Just a few days after the Belskys’ barbecue, the record heat broke with a heavy rain that woke me. It had flooded the windowsills and pooled along the baseboards, and I moved from room to room to swab it with towels as they slept. In the moonlight, the house held still for me, spellbound for my baffled, outsider’s eyes—the living room with the remnants of a game of Yahtzee between Liz and Elliot, my own bedroom where my wife lay smiling sadly through a dream, and up, up, up, above me, my attic where my son lay snoring, one long, strange, man’s calf exposed atop his sheets. I took the wet towels to the washing machine and sat down at the table in our dark kitchen. I poured myself a tall glass of milk. I ate three dried apricots and a Saltine. It had been three weeks, I told myself. The trap problem had not recurred, and I had seen no other signs of trouble in our pipes or vents. And one by one, I stole back to each room to close all of our windows.
When I woke up the next morning, I was glad I had done so. It was still raining, and by lunch, three counties near San Francisco had flooded. Our papers covered the damage with vivid photographs—families paddling down their streets in canoes, and dogs standing on the roofs of their houses awaiting rescue—and by journalistic magic, these rekindled the dying embers of the story about my dam. It was illogical; no one had suggested heavy rain could cause my dam to fail. But the images of people displaced from their homes filled people with fear, and it doesn’t take much to fan such flames. A picture of water running along the spillway at North Fork (which, of course, is precisely what a spillway is designed for) appeared on the front page of the newspaper with a caption that read “Rainwater overflow at North Fork Dam, still under investigation for risk of failure.” A local radio-talk-show host parked himself by a guardrail one day and measured the depth of puddles along the right abutment. Two days later, a raving cautionary editorial titled “Noah’s Ark” spanned two pages at the end of the A section of the Sacramento Bee. By the end of the week, protesters had assembled on the capitol steps with rain slickers and canoe paddles to dramatize the imminent danger posed by my dam. That night, I brought home a sausage and mushroom pizza, but Liz had left a note on the kitchen counter. Elliot was spending the night at Tim’s, and she was taking Rita out after work to cheer her up, and my surprise that in the last two months she had become a confidante to a coworker whose name I didn’t even recognize somehow made eating the pizza alone in front of the protest coverage even more depressing.
Many of the roofs in Sacramento are flat and prone to leaking, and the bulk of the real damage in our county that month could be blamed on this alone. My office building suffered some. A leak in the roof allowed rain to seep through the ceiling. It wasn’t a large leak, just a dripping in the hall, but it ultimately soaked a fire detector, shorting it out and deploying the sprinkler system on the northern half of the fourteenth floor.
This forced a temporary move for me and six other engineers. Howard insisted on my having a corner office, and he found a vacant one for me on the southwest corner of the second floor. The eastern wing of that floor housed the cafeteria, and from the elevators, I could smell corned beef, French fries, sugar. In the hallway outside my office hung a photograph of the capitol building. The picture was so old that the paper had yellowed, and the skeletal remains of a spider were trapped behind the glass in one corner of the frame. The office itself was spacious but low-ceilinged, and the view lacked grandeur. Even the prospect of I-5 was obstructed by a telephone pole.
Howard assured me it would take less than a month to perform the necessary repairs to Fourteenth East; so I didn’t give much attention to such things. The office didn’t have a filing cabinet, but I didn’t request one. When the thermostat worked poorly, instead of contacting Building Services, I brought an oscillating fan from home. And although Facilities had ignored my instructions and delivered my photographs to me there, I did not unpack and hang them. The boxes of files and frames against the wall gave the space a storage-closet look, but this didn’t really bother me. In fact, I didn’t give the state of the office much thought at all until one afternoon when I had been there almost two weeks Elliot appeared in my doorway.
“It took me a long time to find you,” he said.
“They didn’t change my location on the directory because the move is only temporary.” Suddenly I saw how my not having mentioned it to him might make it seem like cause for shame. I searched for a description that did not sound defensive. “They’re repairing some water damage upstairs.”
He set his backpack on the floor. He looked for my guest chair, and it was under a stack of papers. On top of these was an editorial about the upcoming decision on modifications to my dam. The author was against modifications, but mostly because they were so expensive. We should accept the risk, he felt, even though he seemed to suggest the risk was huge. I stood to move it aside, but Elliot got to it before I did. He sat down, and the oscillating fan passed over him, making his shirt billow. I had been taking all my meetings in a seventh-floor conference room; I hadn’t noticed how awkwardly placed it was for company. His eyes slid sidewards to anticipate the next passage of the fan. “I was headed to the library to meet Tim,” he said, pointing over his shoulder. “I thought I’d stop by and bring you a root beer.”
“Thanks,” I said, a brief hope flaring inside me, but I quickly told myself it was unlikely that it was as social an impulse as this. I wondered if Belsky had told him about my new office—suggested he drop in and surprise me. I felt a sort of dreadful certainty that my son would use both the shock of his visit and the vague denigration of our surroundings to set me off balance in preparation for whatever he had come to say.
He took two bottles from his backpack and set one sweating on my steel desktop. He twisted the cap from his own and took a pull. His eyes flitted around the office.
“I wanted to improve one last thing in my report before I hand it in,” he said.
“What’s that?”
His paper was due the next day, and although in the last two weeks I had counted half-a-dozen times when he might have done so easily, he had not repeated his question about a time when my father had scared me.
“The section about how he died. I only know a little about it, and it seems like I should sort of describe it.”
“It was an aneurysm.”
“Right.” He took another sip. “But did he, um, fall down somewhere? I mean, was he at work, or at home?”
“He died in bed.”
“So Grandma found him in the morning?”
He had taken to calling them Grandma and Grandpa. When he first began this project, he had referred to them as my mother and father. “Your mom; your dad.” Both things made me sad.
“I’m not sure when she found him actually. I was at college. I flew home when she called me.”
“Oh.”
I had been in Pasadena two years and home to visit only twice, both times at Christmas. Although in some ways, the husk-light relations with strangers in a sunny place had been exactly the opiate I had intended, I have never quite forgiven myself for this.
His bottle dripped condensation on the editorial, and he wiped it, but the newsprint had already absorbed it, and a dark welt rose over the type. He set his bottle on the spot. “That must have been sad,” he said. “I mean, was it? Going home for that?”
“Yes,” I said. It was obvious to me that he wanted me to elaborate, but these were not things I wanted him to picture, and I was anxious in a grim way to rush the conversation—to learn why he’d really come.
He took a sip and glanced at my bottle, which sat unopened next to the telephone. Finally, he said, “Can I ask you a question?”
My pulse quickened. “Of course. You can ask me anything.”
He held up the newspaper. “Do you ever feel like writing a rebuttal?”
“No.”
“How come?”
“Because the allegations are stupid.”
“You could tell people that.”
“It would be defensive. It would give them more credit than they deserve.”
“It might make you feel better.”
“But that’s the point, Elliot. That is exactly the point. I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad in any way.”
Condensation dripped from his root beer to his pant leg. A stridency had entered my tone that undermined my argument. I felt the need to diffuse this, and also to regain my footing for the assault to come, but I had trouble thinking of anything to say. Before I could even try, he said, “I better get going.”
“All right,” I said, surprised. I had expected tougher.
He said, “I’ll just head to the library.”
“Okay.”
“Unless you have time to look at something,” he said, laying a hand on his backpack. “I mean, I brought something I thought you’d like to see.”
At this my pulse raced. I felt a hunted conviction, a certainty that he was finally drawing his sword. Wild guesses flashed through my mind—nude pictures, drug paraphernalia, his report on my father—but I cut my thoughts short. I did not want to pause long enough to allow him to complete his move.
“Oh, Elliot,” I said. “I really wish I could, but today I can’t.”
“That’s okay.”
“I have a meeting.”
He put both hands up, and he blushed more deeply than I’d ever seen. “No big deal,” he said.
I felt the rise of a new kind of panic. Curiosity made me brave. I said, “Maybe another time…”
He shrugged.
I said, “You could bring back whatever it was you wanted to show me.”
He was still blushing.
I said, “What is it anyway?”
“Just a book.”
“A book?”
“Yeah.” He could not make himself look at me.
“What book?” I said.
He unzipped his backpack then and drew out a book with a torn dust jacket and a faded bar code from the public library. He held it still in his lap for a few seconds, considering, and then flipped it over shyly to let me see the cover: an old photo of two men in gym shorts and 1950s crew cuts standing face-to-face behind the protection of upraised gloves. I read the title: The Sportsman’s Guide to Boxing.
“Oh, Elliot,” I said.
“I thought maybe it was like the one you checked out in high school before that fight.”
“It is,” I said.
He made a show of studying the cover.
I said, “It might even be the same one.”
He slid it on my desk next to my unopened root beer.
I said, “Maybe we can look at it together later.”
“Sure,” he said, not unkindly. He zipped up his backpack. “Or you can look at it without me,” he said.
It’s interesting how strong a role timing plays in history. So near to his leave-taking was the next knock on my door that I was certain he had returned. But when I called out to come in, Belsky appeared, one hand holding a bologna and lettuce sandwich and his tie tucked ridiculously into his shirt pocket. Mustard crusted one corner of his mouth.
“Oops. Got lost on the way to the ice machine.”
I forced a smile.
He held up a manila folder. “I’m here to take your fingerprints.”
I waited.
“We’re going to have to incarcerate you for the drowning deaths of a thousand citizens.”
“What can I do for you?” I said.
“I’m here for those extra pictures of North Fork.”
“I filed everything I had.”
“There’s one I’ve seen in your office though.” He glanced around. “A framed one, I think.”
He had difficulty describing it, as if he had not paid very much attention during his visits to my office—as if he did not even remember that I myself was in the photograph. As he stumbled about, referring to one of the right abutment, or the left one maybe, or of the whole canyon, yes the whole canyon, I remained silent. When he sputtered out, I told him I was afraid he’d have to be more specific.
“Come on, Albright. You’ve had it on your wall for six years.”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“It’s probably in that box right there.”
“You must be mistaken.”
At this point, my telephone rang. Belsky held up a finger, as if to stop me from answering, and it was specifically this that made me take the call. The voice was immediately familiar, although this time she took a more respectful approach. “Mr. Albright, it’s Sylvia de Silva. From the Bee.”
I have thought many times about how things might have turned out differently had the circumstances preceding that moment been altered in any way. Had I remained in my prior office and the picture still been hanging; had Belsky come by without that sandwich that somehow highlighted all I disliked about him; even had I not requested that he close the door behind him. That might have been enough. I would have paused long enough to rise and close it myself. Instead, when it clicked in its frame and I saw his body pass down the hall, I uncovered the mouthpiece on the receiver. “I’m not the spokesperson for the agency. I said so before.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve already called Leonard Berkman, and I can leave you alone, I just, you know, things have changed a little. I thought you might have something to say.”
As she said this, her voice grew fainter, as if she had drawn her face away from the receiver to look through some papers or take a sip from a cup. I learned later that she had been writing for the Sacramento Bee for many years at this point. She had probably become so accustomed to asking such questions and receiving refusals to comment like my last one that she had placed this call to me with no more agitation than she did a call to verify the spelling of a name. I pictured Elliot searching the shelves of the public library for something that could touch me. I pictured Belsky getting out of the elevator on the fourteenth floor, within earshot of his phone. It was late afternoon, and the aluminum louvers on my blinds were warm to the touch when I parted them. Below me on the highway, traffic was clotting near the J Street exit. A yellow dog lay in the far left lane, and the cars slowed and swerved to avoid it.
I said: “The dam is sound.”
She coughed and drew the mouthpiece closer to her face. “Then why is it being investigated?”
“Slow year for Safety of Dams.”
“How do you mean?”
“The rest of us are busy. Applying for funding. They don’t want to get cut.”
I heard a page turn. “Ooh,” she said quietly, as if to herself. Then: “What else?”
“I think that’s enough.”
“Wait, wait. What do you think about the remediation proposal?”
“I think we can all agree that it’s a big waste of taxpayer dollars to reengineer a dam constructed on the same principles the Romans used to build structures that have been standing for almost two millennia,” I said. I felt a dryness in my throat. I hung up the phone.
I stood then and took a pair of scissors to the box leaning against my window. The truth is I had opened it and retaped it several times since I had moved there two weeks ago: twice on Monday mornings when I puzzled over what made Elliot spend so much of the weekend at Belsky’s; but more often in response to a feeling I cannot describe except to say it passed over me like the sudden silence in a hotel room when the stranger next door turns off his TV. Such things can take my breath away. They bring with them such quick sorrow.
Withdrawing the photo from its box had a different effect on me every time. The details of the photo itself, of course, were always the same: the crest of the high right abutment wall. Cap; gravel; sky. My own clear pleasure. Usually this last made me grateful, but today more than anything it was a kind of taunt. My hair was windblown, and I was wearing that expression of unguarded delight unique to men whose sons have not yet begun to doubt them.
WHEN ELLIOT WAS TWO YEARS OLD, I LINED THE BASEMENT WITH shelves. I built them from red oak, and sometimes Liz brought him down to play with a small box of tools at the foot of the stairs. It slowed me down. I would ready myself to sand a shelf and notice him hammering at the hand rail four steps from the bottom, his little heel overhanging the riser. I would set the board against the wall and cross the room to show him the pin on the hinge to the mechanical closet door; it needed banging. Then just when I had set myself up again for sanding, I would notice a can of varnish with a loose lid and stop to move it out of his reach. Work took three times as long and was fraught with an awareness of his mortality that made my stomach light. But his presence was a sort of food to me. Every ten minutes I redirected his heart-swelling focus to new tasks whose importance I inflated just to see the seriousness that came over his face. He cut his eyes to my hands and changed his grip on the tools to match mine. He accented my work with reasons to encircle his small torso with my fingers and move him bodily—that tiny rib cage and protuberant belly; his smell of soap and crushed apples; the soft hairs on the back of his neck. That is what I remember: those sudden swells of physical restlessness that parental love fills one with—maybe if I tickle him, or toss him in the air, or take his head in my hands, or press him close to my heart…
The shelves took three months to build, and when I was done he watched me line them with banker’s boxes and hang a pen holder on the wall. Already, he had drawn pictures—a circle; a series of lines; the tiny hatch marks that were letters to him at that age—and this is where I planned to keep them. Over the years, other things went into the boxes too: photographs, awards, class projects, pieces of family history—and when I got home from work the day I spoke to Sylvia de Silva, I went downstairs to find one.
It was mixed in with my coursework from a mechanical engineering class because I did not want them to find it. I am not sure why anymore. It was a brown paper accordion file full of mementos of the successes my mother was always celebrating: a one-dollar bill from my father’s first customer; a picture of my father installing a pipe on a Tudor house in Hopewell; the schematic from the plumbing system he designed for a small hotel; the invoice he never sent an elderly woman in Hoboken; a program from the 1949 Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Convention that listed my father’s speech, “The Mysteries of Drain-Waste-Venting Systems.”
I put them back in the accordion file. Upstairs, I found the door to the attic closed. I knocked, and instead of calling out, he padded across the room and opened it.
“I’m sorry for interrupting,” I said.
He was looking at my hands. “What’s that?”
“Something I thought might help you with your report.”
“What is it?”
“A folder of things my mom kept of my father’s.”
His report was due tomorrow; the offer, coming now, might reasonably have made him angry, but he looked behind him and opened the door wider. He gestured toward his spare bed—moved up at Liz’s urging for friends he would never bring home—and so that is where I set it. Then he looked through them quietly, one leg bent on the bedspread and the other foot flat on the floor while I stood beside him, too chastened by his private manner at his door to really feel welcome. He turned them over one by one.
“Where did you find it?”
“It was downstairs. Mixed in with my college notebooks somehow.”
He examined the invoice long enough to constitute a question.
“He did that work for free,” I said. “My mother was proud of him.”
He looked up at me. His pupils moved around in tiny abrupt increments, just like his mother’s: my mouth; my eyes; my hands. He ran a hand over his dark new hair. “Do you want a chair?”
“That’s okay.”
“Or you could sit on the bed, too. There’s room.”
“I’m all right.”
“There’s room.”
“Okay,” I said, and remembered, as I settled there, how soft his old mattress was. It had been a long time, I guess, since he had invited me to sit.
“What about this?” He held up the dollar bill.
“From his first solo job,” I said.
“What was it?”
“A clogged toilet.”
“Were you there?”
“Yes. Sort of. I was in the car outside. My mom wanted us to watch.”
He pushed at his glasses. He was looking at the photograph from the 1954 science fair my father had not attended. At first glance it looks like a crowd shot, all of the people are so small, but far in the background I am standing in front of my display explaining the workings of my centrifugal pump to a man with black-rimmed glasses. It was an odd thing to store among the work things that had made my mother proud, but as I looked closer, I realized that the hat and coat on the woman in the corner next to my station were my mother’s. My father must have taken the shot.
Elliot held it up to me.
“It’s from one of my science fairs,” I said. “That’s me back there.”
“Who took it?”
“He did.”
The fair was in Passaic, a ninety-minute drive in each direction. When my mother and I got home afterwards he had been sitting in his chair next to the Austrian clock. He had a deck of cards laid out that made it appear he had done nothing with his day. There were dishes in the sink from both breakfast and lunch—a half-eaten ham sandwich; a hard-boiled egg—meals he could not possibly have eaten. “Sorry,” he had said, regarding my mother coolly. “I got distracted.”
Elliot held the photo close to his face, studying it. Although I only saw my mother cry twice in my life, both times it had been from the sort of joy only relief from sorrow can bring, and there was no question in my mind that she had done so when she discovered this picture. When it began to seem Elliot might never stop studying it, I said, “I looked through the boxing book after you left.”
“Oh yeah?” he said, but he was still holding the picture.
I said, “It’s got some of my best moves in it.”
He forced a smile.
I said, “Maybe I could teach you a few.”
“Yeah.” He set the picture on top of the file. “Sure.” His stomach growled then, loudly, and he glanced at his watch. I had a sudden image of him arriving home alone, trying the kitchen door before remembering he had to use his key, and I thought about the way he and Liz had stood in the kitchen together last month, discussing his favorite bands. I wondered if he knew her absence was my fault, and because I could not apologize for this without inviting questions about a lot of things, instead I said, “I thought about what you suggested.”
“About what?”
“About writing a rebuttal.”
It was still light out, but he had already changed into his pajamas, the same cotton button-front-and-pants style he had been wearing since he was eight. I don’t know what made him decide to change early some evenings, but it always made me uneasy, sometimes tongue-tied, at once recalling a thousand nights of bath time and stories and making me aware of their passing, his size and his Adam’s apple making a costume of those clothes. He drew his foot from the floor up onto the bed and gripped it, waiting. My ears felt hot.
I said, “What I meant this afternoon is really true. I mean, I still mean what I said—that I think it would give them more credence than they’re due—but I respect your opinion, and I thought about it more. I think there are a lot of people who don’t know what to think one way or the other—not the reporters or the people who write those editorials, but the people who don’t have an opinion in the first place and then read the paper.”
I became aware from his gaze that my hands were troubling the elastic band on the accordion file. I laid them on the bedspread. “That reporter called again after you left, and I told her what I thought.”
“You did?”
“I gave her a comment.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I thought the investigations were mostly a way of justifying funding for a part of the Department that didn’t have a lot of work to do.”
“You said that?”
“Yes.”
He laid a hand on the scrap file. His forehead was a little damp from where his hair had rested. He had taken an evening shower, probably because he had done push-ups in his room. Liz used to wash his hair with something that smelled like daisies to me, and I remembered that now, his slicked back hair, wet feet slapping on the hard wood; he had made a game of being dried. Part of me wanted to tell him the other things I had said, but I felt the need to be careful, and I knew these things would appear in the paper anyway.
He said, “How did you say it?”
He held my father’s dollar bill in his hands.
I said, “What do you mean?”
“Like what kind of words did you use?”
“I don’t remember exactly.”
“Was it an accusation, the way you said it?”
“I guess we’ll see in the paper.”
He folded the dollar bill. Once; twice; again—a tight little roll of green.
He said, “Isn’t it bad for your department, what you said?”
Of course it was, and although it’s obvious to me now that he was in fact desperate to hear that I had finally given my anger sway over principle, I myself was too ashamed of this to do anything but mislead him. “Public sentiment will affect the decision about structural modifications,” I said. “There’s a lot of money at stake. That’s important too.”
He looked up at me. “That’s what you were thinking when you talked to her?”
It was the first time, I think, I ever lied to him about my own character. “Yes,” I said.
Elliot followed me down the stairs then. He stumbled once to keep from overtaking me, and I noticed that one of his knees popped loudly in its socket every time he stepped down. We moved together like this, silently aware of each other, into the kitchen, and made a quick dinner of scrambled eggs and bacon, which we ate in front of the TV news. In a hospital in Utah, Barney Clarke had died after one hundred and twelve days of life with the world’s first successfully implanted artificial heart. Elliot went upstairs to his typewriter to finish off his report on my father, and although a number of times I tried to force myself to stop listening, I did not hear the last keystroke until an hour after Liz got home and slid quietly into bed beside me in the dark.
It isn’t necessary to recount what the article said. It quoted me exactly, and because the Sacramento Bee is not one of the country’s largest papers, it didn’t make as much of this as it might have with more reporters to research my allegations, but it made enough of it to appear damaging to my department. Elliot was quiet at breakfast, his report sitting next to his napkin ring in its blue cover where I imagine he had hoped it would demand attention.
When Liz read my quotation, she looked up at me with more interest than she had shown since she started work at the Crisis Center but, to my surprise, showed no suspicion that what I’d done was anything but carefully considered.
She smiled. “Did you really say this?” she said.
“Something like that.”
“What made you decide to do it?”
“It just seemed right,” I said.
She nodded as if this confirmed her expectation and looked down again to finish the article. I was at first relieved, but there was a fear I didn’t quite understand already beginning to haunt me. The man she had known before I sent her away was a man who suppressed all impulse. By now she was too distant from me to guess that my self-control had finally been plundered by my sorrows.
Elliot said, “Did you tell your boss, Dad?”
“No,” I said. “It was too late for him to do anything. He’d just have worried until he read the article.”
“Won’t he be mad?”
Liz said, “Your father’s their best engineer.”
“Yes,” I said. “He’ll be mad.”
“What do you think he’ll do?”
“Give the nice office to someone else next time,” I said, and I laughed. I had given it a great deal of thought in the car on the way home, and here is what I imagined: a nervous and stern reminder about politics, and next, the subtle but distinct beginning of Belsky’s ascension—better office assignments, invitations from Howard, and, some years from now, a leapfrogging promotion to Branch Chief when Howard retired.
A timer buzzed, and Liz rose from her chair without finishing the article to take a cookie sheet of frozen doughnuts from the oven. She checked her watch and set about rearranging a stack of volunteer training manuals in her briefcase. She spread them between the compartments and transferred a thick binder to the outside pocket. Then she checked her watch again and clipped across the tile floor in her pumps to take three champagne flutes from an upper cupboard. She transferred our orange juice from their tumblers and toasted my integrity and bravery, as if she believed my speaking to de Silva were the considered act of conscience I had tried to make it seem. Elliot smiled and passed a hand over his mouth—a tick left over from the weeks before he began shaving—and stood in the driveway at Liz’s command to see me off to work. Looking at them in my rearview mirror, I thought of myself in the service van with my mother outside my father’s first solo job, and I inhaled a bit of doughnut and had to pull over four blocks from my house to collect myself. Tears had welled up, partly from the quick shock of choking that always makes me briefly imagine and accept death, but mostly, I still think, from the unsettling parallels of that memory.
At the office, I was afraid to leave my car. When I finally did, I stood at the lobby store looking at ballpoint pens and watching the crowd gather by the elevator until I remembered that I had been relocated to the second floor. I slipped to the stairwell door and walked up. The hallway was empty and smelled of cafeteria grease. I closed my door and waited. To pass the time, I drew my blinds and looked out the window. Traffic was bunching and spreading in its odd patterns. A helicopter passed low to report, and then banked off to the left.
The first knock on my door was not Belsky, but Howard. I asked him in, and when I sat down, he made a decision to stand. He held his pad in one hand, but it bore no notes, and he did not pick up my picture frame. He closed my door and said, “What were you thinking?”
I was not used to his being direct, and it took me a few seconds to answer. “I wasn’t. It was a mistake.”
“You’re damn right it was.”
I was suddenly amazed that I had not thought more about what I should say.
I said it again: “It was a mistake.”
He wiped his hand across his brow. There was a sip straw peeking out of his shirt pocket. “I can’t believe it was you. I thought it would be Belsky who would do it. I’ve been by his office six times to remind him not to, he’s such a hothead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That doesn’t help me.”
“I know.”
“You see what I have to do, don’t you?”
Suddenly I did. “I don’t think that’s necessary. People will know better.”
“No they won’t.”
Now he picked up my picture. I tried to think of alternatives I might suggest, but I couldn’t come up with any.
He said, “I’ll give you a choice, but it has to be bad enough to send the message,” he said.
“I’ve never done anything like it. You could say you took that into account.”
“People won’t remember your history; they’ll just remember that nothing happened to you when you shot your mouth off and said what everyone wishes they could say.”
“I could write something to the paper. A clarification.”
“Back-page stuff,” he said. He looked at the photograph of me with my family in front of the house I had built. “Damn it,” he said. He took the sip straw out of his pocket but didn’t put it in his mouth. “So what part of the state would you pick if you had to?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Come on.”
“Sacramento.”
“I’m giving you a choice.”
“It doesn’t matter; I won’t take it.”
“Fresno then,” he said, and by lunchtime I was loading packed boxes into my car. Office workers were eating their lunches from paper sacks in Capitol Park. When I got home, the house was quiet. I ate some crackers from a plastic sleeve and drank a glass of milk. Then I went to the basement and took out my toolbox. Liz had been complaining that a safety feature on her hair dryer was making it shut off after increasingly short intervals of use. I didn’t think it would be difficult to fix this, and I wanted to be busy when they got home. I was standing at the kitchen counter removing the pink plastic casing from the handle when I heard the car pull into the driveway. Elliot opened the door, and Liz came in behind him.
When she saw me, she looked at the watch she had bought for work so she could track the length of her calls. “They did something crazy, didn’t they?”
“As a matter of fact, they did.”
“Ridiculous!”
“Dad got fired?”
“Not fired,” I said.
“Sacrificed,” said my wife.
I fit a tiny screwdriver bit into a hole on the hair dryer nozzle. “They offered me a transfer to Fresno.”
“And?” Liz said.
“I resigned.”
She set her briefcase on the counter. “Good for you,” she said, but she did not look at me. She was tucking the folders of volunteer training handouts back inside the zippered flap.
“Did you yell at them, Dad?”
Liz looked up. “Of course he didn’t.”
“But they took his job.”
“From your father? They didn’t take a thing!”
“They didn’t?”
“Does he look upset to you?”
“No.”
“Ask him if he’s upset.”
“Are you, Dad?”
I made myself smile. “Of course not.”
“What did I tell you?” she said, and she touched the shaved nape of her neck.