ELLIOT’S QUESTION STAYED WITH ME EVEN AFTER HE HAD handed in his finished report and giving him an answer could not help him. Most often I would think about it at night as I tried to fall asleep, which became increasingly difficult for me. My unemployment itself did not cause much stress—I expected finding a job to be easy, and in fact I had received my first offer just a week after my resignation—but nevertheless, I found myself operating on fewer and fewer hours of sleep. Sometimes I would rise and eat a snack in the slats of moonlight cast by our shutters on the kitchen table. Sometimes I would go to the basement. And sometimes I lay in bed next to Liz pretending to be asleep so that she wouldn’t know my anxiety was mounting. When I woke, I kept my eyes closed and my arms at my sides. I might tick through my calendar of appointments for the week. There was a lot to juggle. Consulting engineering was a growing field that decade, and as a candidate I was sought after. I recall a few days when I had two breakfasts, and one when I had two lunches. I ordered a salad to keep my appetite for the second seating.
But more often than not, what I did was turn over answers to Elliot’s question in my mind: the strange catalogue of moments with my father when I remembered being afraid. One night, a week after my resignation, I woke hot and perspiring. I should have risen to open the windows or turn on the air-conditioning, but by then, for reasons I can no longer fully reconstruct, I had decided letting Liz know I was awake would be dangerous to me. Instead, I gently peeled back the bedspread and let my perspiration evaporate through the top sheet. As I waited for this to bring me some relief, listening to the sound of Liz’s tongue searching her mouth and the thick shade scraping the window casings, I thought about the first time my father came home two hours late. He came through the kitchen door and set a paper bag on the table.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
“That’s all right,” my mother said. Although I had witnessed her weeping a few times when she thought she was alone, she always managed to give my father what she thought he needed. “Dinner’s still warm.”
“I was doing a little shopping.” He did not look at me. I was sitting on a stool near the kitchen sink. My mother drew a ham out of the oven and set the pan on the counter.
He said, “Guess what I bought?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I didn’t say tell, I said guess.”
“A new torque wrench?”
“Nope,” he said. “Something just for fun.”
Her back was still to him, and now he pulled the bag towards him on the table. He had landed his first customer over a year before, and now his independent practice was thriving, just as my mother had predicted. But instead of allowing her faith or his success to make him happy, he had let his suspicion of the indifference at the core of my mother’s devotion consume him. Although I suppose he still loved us, as that science fair photo suggests, his morbid quest to expose her dispassion was apparently worth the price of hiding this. He made promises just so he could break them; he brought home that picture of himself with the dancer; and now, when my mother turned from the stove, he put his hand in a paper bag and drew out a pistol.
“For target practice,” he said. “I thought Luther and I could drive out to Walpack and shoot cans. How does that sound to you, Luther?”
I glanced at my mother. Her eyes were fixed on it. I was stunned and frightened, but it’s clear to me now that this was less because of any danger the gun itself posed than the betrayal of my mother it represented.
“Okay,” I said. I almost added, If it’s okay with Mom, but these words seemed somehow pregnant with significance and complication—as dangerous as the gun itself seemed to be—and I couldn’t bring myself to articulate something explosive that I didn’t understand. In retrospect of course it is clear that this would have been the first time I’d called attention to the fact that there was a side to be taken, and this acknowledgment of conflict was something I shied from, maybe because he seemed to relish it, or because my mother, whom I loved, avoided it, or maybe, I have sometimes wondered, because it is just something of which I am constitutionally incapable, and always will be.
Remembering this, I lay awake for two hours without turning, and when I sat down to breakfast the next morning, I couldn’t meet Elliot’s eye. Although I still believed in the importance of my intentions, sometimes when he looked at me the chasm of omission in my comments for his biography made me feel secretive and shameful. I buttered my toast looking at the newspaper and he read his Road & Track. The humidity that had built in the night was just beginning to break in the form of light rain on our closed windows, and that sound, that faint spatter, was like a derisive whispering behind me. I blushed and took a sip of my coffee.
That night I woke again at one, this time to the sound of hard rain that would turn briefly to hail. I had turned the air-conditioning on, and now under the covers I was cold and wide awake. The realization that the temperature last night was no excuse for my inability to sleep only increased my agitation. I tried again to lull myself with logistics: how long it would take me to drive between appointments tomorrow; which of them would involve street parking, and which of them garages. But soon my thoughts strayed again to the question of my father. Elliot’s driver’s licensing exam was in less than a week, and I remembered how for two weeks before my own test, every night when my mother began setting our filled plates on the table, my father would take his keys to his service van from a nail on the wall and tell her it was time for my lesson. But when we got in the car, I sat a long time awaiting instruction, and invariably my father would at last put a hand on my shoulder and suggest he drive. We traded seats in the darkened street, and he took us five miles along Route 1 and then drove back on a surface road with miles of stoplights, his face changing color, red to green, at the intersections.
At the end of one of these episodes, he dropped me off on the curb. “I’m going to go out for a while,” he said.
It had to be almost nine o’clock.
He said, “Tell your mom I don’t know when I’ll be back and sorry about dinner.” He had not turned off the engine. He meant this. But he was still thinking. “Tell her I just went for a beer or a drive.”
I sat in the car beside him with the engine idling and tried to imagine what had changed my father. It had been months since he’d purchased that gun, and he still had not taken me to Walpack to shoot cans. Maybe he was in some kind of trouble. “Yes, sir,” I said. It was something he had taught me to say, but lately it seemed to irritate him. I walked up the porch steps and into the house.
When he started doing this every night, I began to grow certain he was mixed up in bad business, and worries about our welfare began to keep me awake. I’m not sure if it was these, or a sharp desire to take something from him that made me creep into his closet one day and slip the gun into the waistband of my pants, but that is what I did, relishing the rebellion, this small secret betrayal, even as I longed to find him in the kind of trouble from which he could be saved. That night when he dropped me off at the curb after our lesson, I got on my bicycle to follow him. I didn’t know how far I would get. He might get on the turnpike, or notice me and stop to yell, but I didn’t think about either thing. My heart beat fast, not from the prospect of being caught, but from anticipation of the danger I was now hoping I would encounter. He drove through our neighborhood, past all the row houses, and onto Route 1. I briefly lost sight of him, but the traffic lights were poorly synchronized, and this gave me a chance. I was sweating under my wool coat. The hammer on the pistol chafed against my stomach. I caught him two lights later as he turned into a parking lot shared by a Sweet Dreams Diner, a Pink Lady Show Bar, and a movie theater that was playing White Christmas. As my father got out of his van, I stayed on the corner behind a lamppost, as if its cover would shield me should he turn. I wondered which of these places harbored the crooks who were harassing my father. I bet on the show bar, but instead he walked toward the movie theater. He even bought a ticket. Then he disappeared through its double doors.
I had not thought through my plan. Now that the wind was not on me from riding, I was so hot inside my coat that sweat streamed down my forehead. I crossed the parking lot and left my bike behind a Dumpster in the alley. I dug change out of my pocket, bought a ticket, and went inside. To the right of the men’s bathroom was a flight of stairs that led up to the projection booth where I imagined thugs might be settling a score with my father. But under the weak pressure of a stare from the man at the popcorn counter, I faltered and pushed through the swinging doors into the theater. It was almost empty, and so in the front row it was easy to detect my father’s head.
I followed him five more nights that month, and each time he went to the movies, twice more to White Christmas. When I watched him spoon soup to his mouth in our kitchen, or sat by my mother as she glued the handle on a broken teacup, I thought about what I knew. When I listened to their footsteps through the wall at night, I thought about it. In the last year, she had developed a secret of her own, a pack of cigarettes she took from under her mattress only in the mornings, a habit so benign it only merited hiding because it was a by-product of her pain. Although I expected the senselessness of my father’s actions to damage her further, when I heard him tell her he had something to apologize for, I felt relief.
I sat up on my bed. She was chopping something on the cutting board, and she stopped.
“Set that knife down,” he said. “Why don’t you sit at the table here.”
She set down the knife. A chair scraped the floor. In all my life, I don’t think she denied him anything. “What is it?”
“I been coming home late a lot to go for a beer.”
“I know.”
“It’s been making things tough for you with getting meals on the table.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“The thing is, I haven’t been going for a beer.”
In the silence that fell, I could hear something sizzling on the stove.
He said, “I’m not going to do it anymore, and it’s over, but the thing is, I’ve been seeing a lady.”
More sizzling.
He said, “The truth is, I’ve been seeing her a couple months now. I don’t blame you for being angry.”
There was a charred smell then. The sound of chair legs and a pan being set at the back of the stove. “I forgive you,” she said.
“You what?”
“I forgive you,” she said.
I was still thinking about this on Saturday morning when we drove to the DMV. We arrived half an hour before it opened with doughnuts and coffee. We were not the only ones. On the pebbled-concrete sidewalk, several teenagers sat at the feet of their parents and flipped through driver’s manuals to avoid making conversation. It struck me that Elliot had never been one of these children, but in the weeks since my resignation, with me at least, he had become one. It was only three months until summer vacation, and I consoled myself by thinking about how a remodeling project might rekindle some of the lost ease with him that Liz still seemed to enjoy. I remember distinctly that by this point on our outings together I often had the strange sensation that I was watching someone else’s wife and son, as if their time together in my presence, even when they were just reading side by side in silence, was charged with an intimacy that no longer included me.
Liz opened a box of doughnut holes and held it out towards him.
“No thanks,” he said; “I ate like ten in the car.” He looked down at his magazine, something he’d been buying lately called Auto Craft. He was reading an article titled “Restore Your Own.” He had always been the kind of student who tested easily, and the fact that he had not even brought a copy of the driver’s manual was a measure of his calm.
Liz herself paged through one. “Did you read the stuff about licensing requirements? I can’t believe you get tested on it, but it looks like you can. As if anyone needs to know what kind of certification you need if you’re sixteen and you’re visiting from out of state. As if this information actually helps you drive a car safely.”
Without looking up, Elliot said, “A California license or a Nonresident Minor Certificate.”
Liz beamed. “That’s it exactly.” Then she flipped to a new page.
I opened the newspaper and read an article about a new sweetener that had been approved by the FDA. As nine o’clock approached, the line began to lengthen quickly: an overweight father and son; a girl in a McDonald’s uniform; a man in scrubs; a willowy woman with an embroidery hoop and a bag of orange yarn. At two minutes to nine, a man appeared behind the glass doors with a ring of keys and looked down at his wristwatch. He waited for two minutes to pass and then unlocked the door. Now we all shuffled through it, and Elliot took a numbered paper ticket from a dispenser on the wall. Liz found us three chairs and sat down with the manual.
She said, “Another sample question is, ‘You just sold your vehicle. You must notify the DMV within how many days?’ How can that be important? They’re obviously just checking to make sure people read the manual.” Her eyes slid toward Elliot.
“Ten,” he said.
“Right again.” She shook her head proudly.
When they called his number, he went up and took a test booklet to a shelf along the wall. Liz closed her manual to watch. He leaned on his elbows as he answered, and his back was to us: loose jeans and sneakers. It took him five minutes to complete, and he walked it back up to the desk. After they checked it, a man in chinos and loafers walked out from behind the counter and led Elliot out the door for his behind-the-wheel.
Liz looked down at the manual again briefly, but this was really too awkward a thing to do now that his written test was over. She shut it and laid it on her lap. The tension that built now when we were alone together was still sort of a shock to me, but I have come to believe there is a kind of natural arithmetic to intimacy—that lack of context between two people will grow exponentially because it makes new data so awkward to exchange. In the last week, I’d been offered two more jobs, but somehow I still hadn’t told her, not because the offers themselves were secret in any way, but because my feelings about them were tied to too many things I hadn’t shared.
One was a firm that designed tailings dams—the dams that hold back waste left over from mining or distilling done by industrial clients. Their offices were in a new building downtown, and their desks were made of mahogany. Such is the nature of a business with a marketing department. As I waited for my interview, I sat on a thickly upholstered chair and drank coffee from a cup with a saucer. The job description involved site investigation, and they had clients in Mali and São Bento, Brazil. It would no doubt pay well, and the change in the technical aspects of the work might have appealed to me—I knew nothing about designing for toxic reservoirs—but as I neared the end of my interview, I found I was already rehearsing the lines of my refusal. The engineer who interviewed me seemed competent, but as I answered his questions, I could not shake an image of myself sitting across a Formica-topped table from him, unfolding a sandwich wrapped in deli paper. In my mind, the deli was filled with noise, the cashier calling out orders, other customers talking, but our table was clouded over with a silence that amplified the noise of our bags and wrappers. By the end of the interview, I was certain I had impressed him, and took his call the next day for granted, but when it came, I felt no excitement. He asked for an answer within two weeks, and I knew immediately both that I would wait a full two weeks to call him, and that when I did, I would say no.
Sacramento Municipal Utility District offered me a job as a Civil Engineering Supervisor to manage not only the design of dams, but also all the concrete vaults and bridges in their system. I’d been screened first by a Human Resources Counselor in shiny support hose and a blouse that tied at the neck who called me Mr. Albright and didn’t look up from the list of questions on her clipboard more than twice during our interview. It didn’t pay quite as well as the other, but it involved no travel and the hours would allow me more time at home. These were the items I had added to the list in a small notebook at the kitchen table that night as I ate leftover lasagna and listened to the evening news. Elliot was at Tim’s, and Liz was working. It was a very good offer, really. From a technical standpoint, it would involve some new challenges. I added this to the list. The engineer I’d met with had seemed friendly, but now I could no longer remember his name. When I called him the next morning, I had to look it up on his business card. Frank. I asked for printed information on their medical plan to stall for time.
What I found myself looking forward to, somehow, was a meeting with Nathan Sattler, the colleague of mine who had left the Department after he threw the stapler at the conference room wall. He had called me just after my resignation to say he had read the paper and ask if I’d like to talk. He was about to leave town for a dam site in Egypt, but he had suggested we meet when he got back, for some reason at the corner of Thirteenth and L in Capitol Park. I had always thought of myself as very different from Nathan, even felt superior about it back in the days when I sat at the long table at the Pine Cone and watched him throw peanut shells at the screen with Belsky when the umpire made a bad call. But now, as I looked at a long list of interviews with people whose names I had to track on a spreadsheet, the comfort of the shared circumstances of our exits from the Department and the idiosyncrasy of a meeting in the park and the memory of the ease I had once felt at his invitations were like pieces of driftwood in a vast ocean. I looked forward to the interview with unreasonable excitement.
Sitting next to Liz at the DMV, this is what I was thinking about, but instead of saying so, I leaned forward to watch the Chrysler with its STUDENT DRIVER placard pull out of the lot.
“Well,” I said. “I think he’ll do okay.”
“Me too,” she said.
She picked a thread from the hem of her skirt and broke it neatly. When she opened her manual again, it was more than I could take.
“I got another offer yesterday,” I made myself say. “From the power company.”
She smiled pleasantly. “Are you interested?”
“Somewhat.”
“But…?”
“But I’m going to wait to answer them until I’ve talked to one more person.”
“Who’s that?”
“Nathan Sattler. He worked in Design with me before he left to start his company.”
She nodded and ran a hand over the seam of her skirt again, looking for more loose threads. The truth is there had been many times in our marriage when I had chafed under her attention, but now that it had waned, it seemed a clear step in the wrong direction. She nodded as she listened now, something she had never needed to do to indicate her listening—a sort of cover. She turned a page of the driver’s guide. Since we had made the appointment for the test, she had twice mentioned the possibility that we might see more of Elliot once he didn’t have to rely on Tim for rides. I wondered if she was nervous, but felt asking might somehow insult her. She was staring at a diagram of a car turning left onto a one-way street. I kept waiting for her to turn the page but she didn’t. Her hand rose to her face, and she touched her lips lightly.
Finally I said, “He should be back soon.”
“Who?” She blushed when she said this. I still wonder sometimes what she had been thinking.
“Elliot,” I said. “From his test.”
Color blossomed along her collarbone, and she looked down into her lap again. “Yes,” she said. “Soon.” And as the flush subsided, she reached into my lap and took my hand.
A moment later, our son came through the door, and he followed the man in chinos to the back where a woman took his picture with a flash from a giant camera. He waited in a chair along the wall until she called his name. Only then did he look for us, and when he saw me, I remember that he smiled. It’s memories like this of him that still hold the most mystery for me. It’s not so difficult to imagine what he was thinking when he sat down at the kitchen table with his head newly shaven, or when he jumped into the air above our roof. But when he seemed pleased to find my face in a room full of strangers. It’s things like this I keep going over. I would like them to be as they felt to me then—pure—but I find I can’t help but wonder whether the surprises he unleashed on me that year were just impulses that fired suddenly, or careful plans he held in mind even as he made the simple gestures that gave me hope. When he reached our row of chairs, he handed me his license, still warm from the laminator.
NATHAN APPROACHED IN SWEATPANTS AND RUNNING SNEAKERS, grasped me by the shoulder to turn me, and kept walking, bringing me along with him.
“Thanks for meeting me like this,” he said. He was out of breath.
“No problem.”
“It’s good to see you.”
“You too.”
He was holding a small set of hand weights. He pumped his arms as we passed the rose garden. “They did that operation with the balloon on me, and when my family picked me up at the hospital and took me out to dinner, I ordered a cheeseburger, and my daughter said, ‘Don’t you care about us at all?’ She actually said that. I promised her I’d exercise every day no matter what. I sent her a picture from Egypt last week of me trudging across the sand in running shorts and sneakers.”
A squirrel darted in front of us, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Thing is, I’m not sure she appreciated the effort. When I got home, she scowled when I buttered my potato. I said, ‘I’m working on it, baby, I’m trying, didn’t you get my picture? That was a sand dune I was jogging over. In Egypt. Egypt is hot.’” The bridge of his nose was red and peeling.
I tried to formulate a response to this, but one by one rejected words of sympathy, humor, and commiseration. People with briefcases hurried past us. When we reached the corner of Fifteenth and N, Nathan pivoted and pumped back towards the center of the park. Finally I said, “How’d the job go?”
“Fantastic. I’ll have to go out again next month, but the construction engineers aren’t idiots, which was a relief to find out.”
“That’s good.”
“That’s unheard of.”
I laughed.
He said, “So tell me how it happened.”
“Krepps came in the day the article ran and offered me a transfer.”
He stopped and put his hand weights on his hips. “The same day?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re joking.”
“No.”
“Where to?”
“Fresno.”
“Ha!” He started walking again. “What exactly did you say?”
“I said I’d rather look for other work.”
“I mean to the reporter.”
“I told them I thought the investigation of North Fork was a waste of money.”
“Ha!”
“Well, I regret it. It was impulsive, which isn’t like me. I wouldn’t do it again, regardless of the outcome.”
“Then if they call back, give them my number.”
I laughed.
“I’ll give them a sound bite.”
I laughed again.
“You know I’m not joking.”
He turned abruptly toward the fountain, and I had to jog a little to catch up.
He said, “So come to work with us, why don’t you? We’re looking for a fifth, and we haven’t found anyone we like around here. My chief engineer is talking to a guy from L.A.”
“Really?”
He looked down at his watch and put two fingers to his neck. “Yes. Really. Come to our place tomorrow, and I’ll show you around.” He glanced up and smiled. “But this time bring some French fries with you.”
When I stepped into his office the next day, I felt immediately at ease. It was on the second story of a strip mall in Roseville. Although most consulting firms try to impress their prospects with nice offices, most of Nathan’s first clients had been overseas, and as they built up a reputation they discovered its appearance didn’t really matter even to those who saw it. The desks were steel with brown Formica tops and all of the office views were the same, of the parking lot and a hardware store, a dry cleaner, and a veterinary clinic in a similar building on the other side of the road. As we talked, people walked dogs and cats and a cage full of hamster tubing in and out of the clinic door. The receptionist showed me wallet-sized school portraits of her daughter and son. Although I had worn a suit, Nathan laughed about this and tugged off my coat, and it turned out to be less an interview than a sales pitch. Each of his partners came into Nathan’s office to meet me and ask if I had questions, and when they left, Nathan showed me pictures of the dams they’d worked on and handed me a letter in which he described an offer that was not materially better than the others I’d fielded in a financial sense, but made me feel a surge of relief. He told me to think about it, and in order not to seem desperate, I told him I would, although already I was imagining calling those other people and telling them I’d decided to take another job.
When I got home, that is what I did. I’d already refused one of them, and now I called the others, and when I couldn’t get through to the engineers who had made the offers, I spoke to the HR Directors instead. I thought there was a chance I would get a callback from one of them that afternoon with words of persuasion. When I didn’t, instead of feeling insulted, I felt only more certain of my choice. That night Liz worked late, and Elliot spent the night at Tim’s again, and for once neither thing gave me that feeling I’d suffered so often lately that I can now recognize as equal parts worry and shame. I opened a bottle of red wine and poured some into a glass full of ice cubes. I squeezed an orange into it, and crushed a wedge of apple and dropped this in too. Then I took it out on the porch and sat down in a chair next to the hot tub. Summer would come soon enough, and I let the memory of past afternoons and weekend days working beside my son quell my worry that I would lose him. As for Liz, with her working more at the Crisis Center, it struck me that the shortest distance back to intimacy might be to ask to visit her there and meet some of her coworkers. For the first time in weeks, I made plans about this instead of the plumbing problem or my job search. After visiting her work, I might take her to lunch and bring with me a poem I’d written on a napkin at a coffee shop just before I proposed. It would strike a tone. Stars began to show, and I realized I had been so lost in these hopeful thoughts that I’d forgotten to take a sip of my drink. I raised my glass and when it tasted nothing like Liz’s sangria, instead of disappointment, I felt a clean gratitude for my wife that made me laugh alone in my yard.
The following day, Liz was working the day shift, and Elliot told me he was headed to the library after school with Tim. Before he left, I asked him if he’d join us for dinner, and then I bought three T-bone steaks and set the table with cloth napkins. We sat down in the dining room, and Liz asked what the occasion was, and I paused a second to try to temper my excitement before I said it wasn’t an occasion really, I’d just been offered an intriguing job.
“It’s just four engineers,” I said, “but they’ve been around seven years, and even in their first six months, they managed to land a job that had also been bid by Bechtel.”
“Wow,” Liz said. Her cheeks were pink, and she was leaning toward me over the table. “What’s the company called?”
“Interflow. I think I mentioned it to you. I used to work with the principal, Nathan Sattler.”
“Oh, right,” she said.
“The guy Bob called for you?” Elliot said.
He was buttering a roll.
“What?” I said.
He said, “Bob told me he called somebody to tell them about you losing your job.”
“He didn’t lose his job, Ellie,” Liz said. “He quit.”
Elliot’s eyes were on the buttering job he was doing: lots of butter. “He said it was a guy you guys used to work with.” He set his knife down. “He said he went on and on telling this guy about what a good job you’d do.”
“How nice of him,” I said.
Elliot took a bite of his roll. Liz picked up her wineglass. Although I tried to head off the image, immediately I pictured it: the smile on Belsky’s face when the idea occurred to him; the studied casualness as he mentioned it to Elliot at his dining room table under an enormous chandelier purchased by his father-in-law.
I said, “Anyway, like I said, they’re a great company, and I really liked all the partners there.”
Liz took a sip of her wine.
I said, “But I do have one hesitation about working there.”
“What’s that?” Elliot said.
“It would mean a lot of travel. A lot of their consulting is out of state. Some overseas. I need to think that through.”
Liz refilled her wine then and asked Elliot a question about a funny noise Rita’s car was making, and I have to say that the tone of the evening had changed so abruptly that when I noticed the smell, for a split second I thought it might be something my mind had supplied as a kind of metaphor. But it quickly grew too strong to ignore. I know just when they noticed it because Liz’s eyes fell to her wineglass, and Elliot, normally too focused on his food to pay much attention to us anymore, began watching me intently. I understood immediately that they would wait for me to say something about it, and to avoid the sting of their courtesy I stood up suddenly from my chair. Liz was in the middle of a sentence, but I slid the window open and headed to the basement for my toolbox.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, NATHAN TOOK ME TO DINNER AT A restaurant in the Hyatt hotel. His nose was still pink from the Middle Eastern sun. He ordered a bottle of wine from a vineyard in Sonoma I had toured with Liz the year before Elliot was born. Our waiter wore a suit and took our order by memory with his hands neatly folded behind his back. When he turned away, Nathan smiled.
“So, when can I tell the guys the good news?”
“I’ve thought about it a lot, really agonized about this, and I’ve decided I’m not the right man for your job.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m afraid I’m not.”
“What happened?”
I had rehearsed my answer in front of the bathroom mirror as I tied my tie. “I’ll probably regret it because I respect you and your team so much, but I’m sure about this. I don’t think a job involving travel is the right choice for my family.”
He squinted. “It’s not that much really. Half of the jobs are in state.”
“I think any amount would be too much for us right now.”
He stared at me. So much of consulting work relies on sales, and so few good engineers possess the necessary skills, that in retrospect the smoothness of his response alone should have been enough to make me try to change gears right there at the table. He let the silence last, thirty seconds, maybe sixty—much longer than was comfortable. Then he said, “Well,” and smiled, not unkindly. “I think we could make it work for you, but I know when to give up. You give me a call if you ever change your mind.” He was no doubt aware that relenting under such circumstances amounted to conservation of energy if I was really sure, and persuasion if I was not. “Here endeth the business dinner,” he said. “Now tell me about your son.”
And so I did. For the rest of the evening, we talked about our children. He had a twelve-year-old daughter who had been mortified this past fall when he suggested that he escort her and a friend while they went trick-or-treating. In years past, he had worn a costume himself, and his fun-loving company had been a source of pride to her, but this year she was embarrassed at the thought that he would be seen by her friends. For his part, Nathan felt it had grown too dangerous for girls to trick-or-treat alone. Last year in his neighborhood, high school boys had set fire to a pile of leaves and driven a car into a tree. A man in a San Francisco suburb had handed out marijuana brownies at his door. This was the world we now lived in. Nathan’s compromise had been to follow his daughter at a half-block’s distance, ducking behind bushes when other kids passed, and although he laughed when he told the story, as if it were a scene from a comedy we were both watching, I imagined her embarrassment had been both a surprise and a discouragement to him, and the thought of him swallowing his own feelings to protect his daughter’s was again almost enough to make me change my mind and accept his offer.
But I did not. I told him a few stories of my own, even one that I claimed was about Elliot’s adolescent struggle for independence, but was actually about my own. I had been invited to a party, and when my mother brought it up at dinner, my father had told me I couldn’t go. Although our house was only one floor, I was up until two A.M. staring at my window trying to work up the courage to unlatch the security grate and defy him. I did not even want to go to the party, but I had the sense that challenging him would become important, although the next morning when he asked for seconds just as my mother was serving herself her own first helping of eggs, it did not yet occur to me what I might have been practicing for. In the story to Nathan, I found that the made-up symptoms of my own anxiety in bed wondering if Elliot might escape did not differ materially from the symptoms I had felt lying in bed trying to work up the courage to disobey my father. It was a strange thing to have done, but I laughed with Nathan when he signed the credit card slip and suggested that for all I knew Elliot had gone to the party after all. As we stepped out onto the sidewalk into a damp blanket of night that was almost warm, I waited for a last entreaty from him to take a job at his firm, and as he pulled his car key from his pocket, I felt a bolt of loss.
Driving home that night, I thought again about the magician from the birthday party. I had recalled the story during dinner, but I didn’t share it because I had a vague feeling that even in Nathan’s world, where the social currency of choice was self-mockery, this particular anecdote would reflect poorly on me. The truth was, as it turned out, Elliot’s party had not been my only encounter with him. Two years later, I had seen an ad for magic lessons on the bulletin board next to the men’s room at the Pine Cone. That morning I’d found a pregnancy test in the garbage in our bathroom. Liz and I had agreed to stop trying to have another child almost three years before, and finding the test had stunned me in a way I worked hard not to explore. All morning I would catch myself looking out my window, or my fingers pausing above my keyboard, or my coffee going cold in its cup, and at lunch instead of going to the deli, I went alone to the scene of my brief ease among men.
It was probably a bad pick, the bar so urgently begged conversation between its patrons. I ate my sandwich quickly, and when a man sat down next to me while I waited for the return of my credit card, I got up to go to the bathroom. That’s when I saw the ad for the Magic School. Elliot had long since stopped dressing in his cape and practicing with his cards, but I still occasionally took out the book that had come with the kit myself, and later that week, I found myself sitting on a folding chair in a room full of men waiting for the appearance of our teacher. When he stepped not from behind the curtain but from a chair in our midst, I recognized him, and I felt an inexplicable panic, as if a secret failure of mine were being exposed. He asked first how people had found out about the class, and when one man said he’d seen a flyer pinned to the bulletin board next to the dancers’ profiles at Shipley’s, I think I was the only one who didn’t laugh. Next he asked people why they wanted to learn magic, and when the most common answer proved to be so they could do tricks for their own children, instead of making me feel better about the company I was keeping, somehow it made me feel worse. He taught us a trick called the Vanishing Knot, guaranteed to surprise, and over the next few weeks, I practiced it at odd moments alone until the smoothness of the effect made my heart skip. The hesitation came when I looked for an opportunity to show it to Elliot and felt only embarrassment at the thought of revealing my ambition. After a week of this, I resolved to let my interest in magic go, but there was a sense of missed opportunity competing for my obedience.
Driving home from my dinner with Nathan, I felt it again, and try as I might to resurrect the feeling of reassurance Liz had once conjured in me, I found I could not even re-create the substance of her argument. Magicians were unlovable? But I knew she would have admitted the joy they gave was real. Something dismissive about his costume? But her comment had struck me as more meaningful than this. It’s only recently that I was able to recall her line about the cape with any precision. It was the magician’s reliance on mystery to trigger happiness that she’d meant to dismiss. No matter how real Elliot’s pleasure at such tricks, or how pure-hearted the magician’s joy at stirring this feeling, real love couldn’t grow from a bond that relied so heavily on omission.
I wish I’d been capable of this kind of insight then. It might have helped me head off a lot of things. For our father-son time that Sunday, Elliot had asked me to meet him in the living room. When I found him, he was sitting on the sofa, his elbows on his knees and a book on engine design in his lap. I stepped next to him, and he looked up at me.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello.”
He rubbed the knees of his jeans. He had the look he often had in early childhood when he wanted permission to do something dangerous, or when he had broken something obviously fragile. He felt this too, and he looked down at his book again for strength. Then he pulled something out from underneath it: a blue folder with a plastic spine. He handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I said, although of course I knew what it was.
“It’s my report on Grandpa.”
I was holding it in two hands, like a serving tray or a hymnal. I should open it, I thought. Instead I said, “Oh.”
He waited, and I saw that there was bravery and resolve in this pause. I could hear the clock I had built ticking.
“Terrific,” I said finally. “I look forward to reading it.”
He laughed, a short burst. Then he waited. Then he laughed again.
“What’s funny?” I said.
“I finished it three weeks ago, and you still haven’t asked to see it.”
“You didn’t offer.”
“Since when do I have to offer?”
It was a good question. Instead of acknowledging this, I said, “You interviewed me a dozen times, and it’s about my father. Of course I’m interested.”
“Then why didn’t you ask?”
“When you didn’t offer, I decided you must not be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
His head was jutting forward and his eyes were squinting—a posture meant to signify equal parts disdain and legitimate confusion.
I held up his report. “Well, really, thanks. I look forward to reading it when we get back.”
“We’re not going anywhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is it. This is what I set aside time for. Now you’ve got some time to read it.”
He stood and rolled up his magazine.
I said, “I can always find time later this week. Let’s go see a movie or get pizza or something.”
“I made other plans already.”
“Oh.”
“I’m going to the A’s game. Opening day.”
“Okay.”
As he stepped past me, he looked as if he wanted to make some affectionate gesture, but he had obviously resolved not to. This was supposed to be a statement of sorts, I saw. When he reached the door, though, he could not help himself. “See you later,” he said, and although the front door is huge and swings so freely that to close it softly requires conscious effort, when he shut it behind him, it made almost no sound.
I walked to the open window, and saw that Tim’s beat-up gray Pinto was already in the cul-de-sac waiting. As Elliot approached, the driver’s-side door opened, and Robert stepped out to offer Elliot the wheel. He was wearing a green cap with the A’s gold letter embroidered on the front, and a gaudy sateen windbreaker even though it was already seventy degrees. He clapped Elliot on the back as he rounded the door, and I could see Elliot’s head turn towards the house. That he wanted to be sure I had not seen this filled me with more envy than the gesture alone ever could have. Belsky opened the rear door to slide into the back, and seconds later, they were gone.
I walked to the couch and sat down. The report cover itself had nothing on it, which somehow added to the suspense. I imagined opening it and finding something alarming. Something like, “My grandfather, Arthur Lincoln Albright, was not the kind of man most people would consider remarkable. He was a plumber in New Jersey, and he died unemployed of a heart attack at the age of forty-three. But I knew he was an interesting man because my father would never talk to me about him. Now I know why….”
Instead, there was a typewritten cover sheet that read, “Arthur Lincoln Albright, 1915–1958.” Below it was a copy of the photograph I had given him of my father standing in front of his house, his shoulders square and his hands folded neatly behind his back. Below this, in red ink, it read “C+: Not enough interview material to meet project guidelines. Neatly organized. Good typing.”
I did read the report, but the truth was that the teacher’s comments contained the full message he had wanted to pass along to me. It read not unlike a lean encyclopedia entry, plumped up with facts about his hometown and the plumbing trade and a brief biography of my mother that sounded so generic that it mentioned her eye color, something I am ashamed to say he must have gleaned from the driver’s license in the first file of things I gave to him: birth certificates, a wedding license, a copy of their mortgage and the title to my father’s van. It was exactly the kind of thing I had hoped to allow him to write, although I had imagined that the feeling such abridgment would yield was one of relief.
Later that day, the telephone rang, and he told me without any hint of question in his voice that he was spending the night at Tim’s, and the following afternoon, when Liz was called in on short notice to work, I picked him up at school. He slipped in the passenger’s-side door and opened his magazine in his lap.
“Would you like to drive?” I said.
“No thanks.”
“How was the game?”
“Good,” he said, but he did not look up from the page. On it was a picture of a crash dummy striking a windshield with his forehead. He said, “You’re not taking that job with that guy Bob called, are you.” It was more of a statement than a question.
“It’s too much travel, I think. I’m worried about spending less time with you and Mom.”
A small nod. He was still looking at his magazine. He brought it closer a moment to indicate his change in focus, but I could tell somehow from his posture that he was only pretending to read. I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb and thought about what I might say. On the drive to his school, I had tried to prepare for a conversation about his report, but each time I came up with an opening it began with an apology I felt afraid to explain. He held his gaze on the magazine all the way to Sunrise Boulevard before turning the page. He paused here too, but it was only the masthead and an ad for motor oil. The car felt hot. I cracked the window for air, and it riffled the pages of his report on the seat beside me. He looked up at me then, but I could not turn my eyes from the road. I could have glanced at him, but I felt it would cement the strangeness my silence had forced, and so instead I checked my right mirror and changed lanes. The move was abrupt and required me to cut off another driver in a way that was almost aggressive. I knew he would notice this, it was so unlike me, but there was no explaining it away. At last, in the stranger’s voice with which puberty had left him, he addressed me. “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course. You can ask me anything.” With my peripheral vision I saw his eyes scanning my profile. Neon signs passed behind him. I said, “But you might want to wait until after the surprise.”
“The surprise?” he said.
The words had simply risen up in me. My heart pounded. “Yes,” I said. Then I winked at him and turned right into a Toyota auto dealership.
He was hesitant at first, but I told myself that this was only natural. In the end, he picked a sporty coupe with a sunroof, and we test drove it together on the softening tar of the access road he had traveled so many times in Tim Belsky’s Ford. The dealer reached forward between the bucket seats from the tiny rear bench to turn a blast of cool air on our faces and demonstrate the stereo. It was an instinct for diffusing all strains of tension that is the distinguishing talent of even the coarsest salesman, and within an hour Elliot had chosen the car in a color and trim line they had on the lot. We drove across the lot in separate cars, he in front and me behind him, and as he approached the boulevard, his right turn light began to blink. It was then that the anxiety I might have felt but did not in the salesman’s office finally seized me. All the way home, Elliot drove as carefully as an elderly man, coasting to stop signs and watching for signs of me in his mirror.