WHEN I ARRIVED IN THE ATTIC WITH THE SAW, ELLIOT HAD already prepared the area. He had slid his bed towards the stairs and taken down the swimsuit calendar. He had pulled back the rug. On the bare white wall, he had measured and traced a level rectangle with a razor knife. At the sight of me, he kneeled, and I handed him the saw, thinking that letting him do the work himself would take the sting out of the sloppiness we were about to expose. Then he turned to the wall and forced the sharp tip into the Sheetrock.
It is hard to describe the feeling I had as I crouched next to him watching him cut into the wall. Sometimes I wonder how much of the scene has been revised by hindsight, but there’s good evidence that even before I knew what would happen, I was nervous. I remember I’d worn a dark T-shirt, because I knew the tension would make me sweat. Since that day last summer, it seemed he was urging me to tell him I thought there was something wrong with him, to show some disapproval of the person he was becoming, and now in some way the plumbing had once again caused me to do just that. When I’d suggested that an oversight in our work—I’d been careful to call it ours—in the attic might have caused the problem, he had simply nodded and asked what kind of saw we should use to cut into the wall. I’d considered telling him stories of things I had overlooked building the house, pointing out how errors were inevitable even in the work of the most careful craftsmen, but it seemed to me that this kind of obviously scripted comfort would only make more of his mistake. In the end, out of what I will admit was mostly cowardice, I’d decided to wait to see how he reacted to the evidence of his own heedlessness. But the waiting—wondering what I would say, and what he would do, and suspecting that whatever I would say would annoy him as he made his slow careful cut—each stroke of the saw making a sound like ripping cardboard, almost ten full minutes of this—I think this was some of the greatest stress I had ever felt as a parent. Squatting next to him, the sloping ceiling close above our heads, I was getting hot and light-headed and my quadriceps were shaking. I stood and took a step back to the open air beneath the peaked roof. When he set the saw down and wiggled the long strip of Sheetrock free, my heart was racing.
“It looks perfect,” he said.
What I felt first was a little bolt of fear at the sophistication of this. He was making it more awkward on purpose, I thought, forcing me not only to point out his mistakes but also his inability to detect them. I forced a casualness into my tone. “Let me take a look.”
When I squatted next to him though, I quickly saw that he was right. The plastic vent arm was well supported all the way down, every strap hanger attached at perfect perpendicularity to the pipe, all the screw heads flush. At the sight of this, I might have felt a moment of relief at not having to shame him, but suddenly the snow of wallboard dust and the misplaced furniture and the ragged hole in the wall were deeply embarrassing. I tried for a tone of clinical interest, almost enthusiasm: “Interesting. Well, the most likely thing then is the temporary clog.”
He hesitated. “More than once?”
“Sure,” I said. “There could be something insoluble in the waste pipe that keeps catching things temporarily as they go down.”
“Like what?”
“A hair clip or the cap to a bottle of shaving cream. Hair or food could catch on it briefly to plug the drain and then work its way loose with enough water flow.”
When he nodded at this, I knew he had moved to pity for me. I braced myself for his kindness.
“So how do we get at it?” he said.
We would snake the pipes through every fixture drain and cleanout in the house with a seventy-five-foot power snake. We would begin at the top and work our way down. We would miss nothing. I could tell by the way he looked at the floor just when the length of my description began to betray my uncertainty, and I cut myself off. I suggested a trip to Briggs the following afternoon, and again he hesitated. Then he set his glasses back on his ears and said he’d drive straight from school and meet me.
Larry’s wife didn’t seem to notice me when I came in, and, given the circumstances of my visit, I was grateful. She was watching an early incarnation of those shows that specialize in getting real people to discuss their personal problems in front of an audience. A woman was describing her husband’s lack of sympathy about her depression since the last of her children got married. The man tried to interject, but the woman’s voice grew louder and more tremulous, and he no doubt saw the futility of trying to defend his sensitivity by interrupting her on national television. The thought of them eating dinner at home that night after the taping, each silently mystified by the greater distance they felt, made me sad.
I moved to a bin full of neoprene sleeves and focused my attention on the question of a summer project that might be exciting enough to win Elliot’s attention. As much as I had been hanging my hopes on this as a path back to intimacy with him, it had of course occurred to me that after all that had happened he might not want to spend the bulk of his summer on a project with me. Somehow I reasoned that if I chose carefully, I could pick something that appealed to him in terms of challenge and objective, but still allowed him enough time during the mornings and early afternoons to spend time with his friends. I thought of setting the hot tub into the deck, but the truth was he had never brought anyone home to use it as I’d hoped he would, and although the work would involve some tricky problems, it didn’t seem the end result would be enough of a change to be rewarding. I tried to think of improvements to his attic room that he might appreciate, but all I could come up with was wall-to-wall carpeting, which would take a week at most and would require him to move temporarily back into his old room on the second floor. My best idea so far had been an addition to the garage—a new bay where he could park his car in the winter. It would be an interesting project, including some demolition and a lot of framing, but the scale of the job seemed likely to cut into his time at Belsky’s, and I felt a sad certainty that this would be a greater loss to him than the time he shared with me. I was thinking about this, staring at a bin full of screw clamps, when Larry’s wife said, “Did you hear that one?”
I looked around; I was surprised that she had even noticed me.
I said, “I was sort of absorbed.”
“She really chewed him out that time.” She was looking at me over the top of an aisle. “Need help finding something there?”
“No, thanks.”
“You seem to be stuck.”
“Not at all.”
“No man’s an island.”
I said, “Actually, I’m waiting for my son.”
“He’s meeting you here?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, but no fighting this time.”
She meant this to be funny to me, and I smiled to be polite, but the truth was the comment annoyed me. Back in January, when I returned the smoke pump, I had brought Elliot with me. Although I was still putting it off, at that point it was pretty clear that I would have to suggest his own error might be at fault, and I wanted to undercut the insult of this by treating him as an equal partner in the diagnosis. I had shown him the vent increasers, which can be used to widen a vent opening in climates colder than ours. In the winter, the narrow mouth of the stack can fill with ice or snow, and this too can siphon a trap. He was quiet as I talked, and in the end, I may have spent as much as fifteen minutes delving into the physics of venting. When I had gone to the counter to return the pump, Elliot wandered over to a display stocked with flanges, and Larry’s wife leaned towards me. “I’ve got four of my own at home, and sometimes they give me the same treatment.”
“Excuse me?”
“The silent treatment. They think it’s so much torture.” She laughed and shook her head. “Trick is not to fight it. Just take the quiet as a secret blessing.”
I didn’t point out that a little silence in a teenager hardly constituted hostility because it occurred to me that Larry’s death had probably brought a lot of both things into her home. But to be honest, it seemed likely to me that her confrontational style had created plenty of tension in their family even before he was gone. I doubted a person like her would see it this way, though. Not for the first time that year, I thought of that time my father called me to his room to talk to me about the centrifugal pump. Mice had infested the house, but he had not set traps, and their urine scented the hallways. I found him sitting at his bedroom window looking out into the yard, his finger holding a place in a book he had taken from my mother. Outside, the abandoned components lay on a towel in the yellowed grass.
“You finish that pump,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“The pump you started. You’ve been letting it rust to make some kind of statement, I guess.”
“Sir?”
“It’s a good plan you had. Follow through with it, damn it.”
The room was dim with light from the one bulb that had not burned out months ago.
He said, “Your mom spent a lot of time driving you around town finding those parts.”
“I know.”
“Some of them cost money.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think you can do whatever you please? You think you’re not responsible to anybody? You think you can’t make people angry and disappointed just the same as you make them proud?”
“No, sir.”
“‘No, sir,’” he mimicked my voice and shook his head. “Finish that pump by Friday.”
I stared at him.
“Bet you think you’re pretty unlucky.”
I tried to think of an answer to this.
He said, “To have a nasty, lazy, son of a bitch like me for a dad?”
“No, sir.”
I saw my father flinch in the dim light.
We passed a moment in the dark saying nothing, and finally it occurred to me that we were so far apart in this conversation that each of us would be better off alone. As I turned to leave he said, “Your mother, she’d just pick up the rusty parts one day while you were at school and haul them to the dump. She’d be making you soft-boiled eggs next day and sugaring your tea, but me, I’ll take the belt to your ass and not stand to look at you for weeks.” He closed my mother’s book. “I’m the one that loves you.”
I was going over this memory a second time when Larry’s wife spoke to me again. She had stepped from behind the counter and was refilling a bin of washers at the end of the aisle.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Your boy. Looks like he stood you up.”
“That’s unlikely.”
“That’s the next step. That’s it after the silent treatment.”
“I seriously doubt he’d—”
“The stand-up.”
“Nonsense.” I was unsuccessful this time in keeping any of the irritation from my voice, but to my surprise, at the clear sign of it she simply smiled and winked at me. Her hair was a little damp I noticed now, and I could smell chlorine. I was trying to think of something to say that would cut her short and make my disdain for her clear, but instead I pictured her gripping the edge of a swimming pool, her skin sheeting water. Sometimes I watched my thoughts like a man in a theater. They seemed separate from me. Not mine. I looked down at the globe valves. I didn’t really think Elliot would keep me waiting like that intentionally, but when it occurred to me how long I’d been there, lost in my thoughts, I was first startled; then, afraid.
I said, “I need to rent a power snake.”
And she said, “What’s the problem?”
Suddenly, she was more than I could bear. “Please. I just…” I think I must have put my hands in the air, a kind of plea or surrender. I am not sure what I did. I said, “Can I use your phone?”
“Sure you can,” she said. Her voice was softer now. She went in back for the snake while I called, but after six rings, the answering machine picked up and at the sound of Liz’s recorded voice my throat swelled.
When Larry’s wife saw me hang up, she said, “Hey, listen, I’m sure he’s fine.”
I handed her a credit card.
She said, “I used to worry too, but being late never once meant an accident. It was always just to get a rise out of me.”
I made a business of arranging things in my wallet. Bills from biggest to smallest. I saw that picture from the Grand Canyon, and this time I did not take it out.
She was saying, “And if you want, one of my kids or Larry’s brother could help you out with that clog. I could do it myself after closing. I could even close early if you want.”
“I’m fine. Really. Thank you,” I said.
“Okay.” She cocked her head and shook it once, ever so slightly. “Good luck, Luther Albright.”
The traffic on the highway was thick, and it took me fifteen minutes to reach my exit. While he had always been a responsible boy, during our lessons together, I’d detected the seeds of a clear tendency to challenge other drivers on the road. I was aware of the unlikelihood of a newly licensed teenage driver with his own car choosing to ride his bike, but that’s nevertheless the absurd kind of thing I found myself hoping for. In the first weeks of ownership, I reminded myself, he actually drove it very little. One night, I woke and went downstairs for a glass of seltzer and saw him standing barefoot in the driveway in his pajamas, just staring. As I turned onto Alameda, I seized on the possibility that Tim had given him a ride, but this seemed unlikely too. Elliot’s car, of course, was much nicer than Tim’s.
When I pulled into the cul-de-sac, his yellow coupe was there. I opened the front door to the sound of bass music playing above me, and although his taste in music had evolved into something only Liz seemed to understand, I felt a quick lightness beneath my breastbone at the sound. I was as excited to see him as if he’d been away for weeks. Although I wasn’t a young man, I took the stairs two at a time. When I crested the second flight, I found him lying on the sofa in his attic bedroom, eating a peach, his hand glistening with juice. He looked up at me from his magazine, eyebrows raised, and I thought of my father holding that hand of cards after my science fair, the sink full of dishes. A rivulet of juice ran into Elliot’s sleeve, and I understood with certainty that Larry’s wife had been right. My son had left me waiting intentionally.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi.”
“I think your mom left casseroles in the freezer for us.”
He blinked.
I said, “I like the ham and bean, but I think there’s also tuna noodle, if you prefer.”
“What?”
“Ham and bean then,” I said, and I turned and went down the stairs.
In the pantry, I opened the standing freezer. Inside was a stack of casseroles in blue-lidded Tupperware containers each prepared by Liz when her hours at the Crisis Center first began to increase. Standing there looking at them, I was struck at once by the tenderness of these preparations and the premonition of detachment that allowed her to make them, and again I felt that rise of suspicion that was my stunted heart’s mistranslation of a sense of loss. The purchase of Elliot’s car had secretly terrified me, but she had not even really seemed surprised, and I couldn’t help but wonder if before she had begun quietly moving her emotional life to the annex I’d chosen for her, she would have been able to accept a sign of my desperation so serenely. I popped the lids to examine their contents. Frost covered them like a pelt. I parted the hoary filaments on the surface of each one with the edge of its lid, but this revealed almost nothing. Shapes merged. One looked pinker than the others. A tomato sauce probably, but suddenly I couldn’t remember which of her casseroles even contained tomatoes. I picked up the phone and was confronted by the stark fact that she had been working there for three months and I had never tried to call her. I took out the phone book and saw that they had paid extra to have their listing printed in bold-faced type. When I dialed, they answered on the first ring.
“Crisis line. My name is Heather. What’s yours?”
I hadn’t thought this through. “Um,” I said.
She let a silence fall, and I imagined how this might encourage another kind of man to share his troubles.
I said, “I need to talk to Liz.”
She paused for a second. Then she said, “Okay. Sit tight.”
She put me on hold without sound. I felt a pinch of heat beneath my arms.
Liz came on the line. “Rudy?” she said.
“No, it’s me.”
“Luther?”
“Who’s Rudy?”
“One of our frequent callers,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
I looked down at the casseroles. “That woman, Heather, shouldn’t be giving her name out.”
“It’s not her real name.”
“Oh.” I thought about this. “What’s your fake name?”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah.”
In one container, I saw what was probably a potato; a gray trace of a sausage. A breeze through the open windows raised the hair on my arms.
She said, “Luther, what’s going on? You’ve never called me here before.”
“I just thought I’d check to see what you’d like for dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“I know you won’t be home in time to eat with us, but you might be hungry when you get back.”
She didn’t seem to know what to say to this.
I said, “I like the ham and bean.”
“Okay.”
“Is there ham and bean in the freezer?”
“I think so.”
“How can I tell?”
“Smell for mustard.”
“Mustard.”
Above me, I heard the thrum of water filling our son’s bathtub, and right away I braced myself. These days any plumbing sounds would wake me from a deep sleep, as did breezes and outdoor noises, all of them taunts.
“Luther,” Liz said, “are you sure you’re okay?”
“Sure I am.”
“Where’s Elliot?”
“Upstairs.” I leaned over the counter and inhaled, and the scent came to me, sharp and clear. “Oh, here it is. Thank you. See you tonight.”
I served it in front of the television, because lately this seemed to be what he wanted. Remote controls were new then, and when I had purchased our first I had surrendered it without argument to Elliot’s restless command. Now he settled in an armchair with his plate balanced on his knees and flipped through the channels: Pat Sajak clapping for the passage of dollars on his giant wheel, a woman soaking her fingers in dish soap, a map of Sacramento County troubled by paper clouds. He paused on what appeared to be the scene of a dinner party in a banquet hall. White streamers hung from the ceiling, and above a dance floor sparkled a giant mirrored ball. When a man in a bright white uniform and cap approached a table of elderly couples, I recognized it as The Love Boat, and to my surprise, Elliot set the remote on the side table and picked up his fork.
I had seen the show probably half-a-dozen times, and from this it had not been difficult to glean that the formula involved the problems of three different couples aboard a cruise ship. It seemed to me that at the age of fifteen, with a new girlfriend, and after the awkwardness about the underwear in his bathroom, he was fairly likely to be uncomfortable watching a show about romance with me—particularly one in which the sex lives of characters was a frequent topic. But no sooner had I completed this thought than it came to me that it was my own discomfort he would be trying to stir. So I braced myself, and, as absurd as I knew they would be, I settled in to focus on the plots.
The first appeared to be about the fiancée of a powerful congressman who was worried that a nude photo she had taken long ago for an erotic magazine would jeopardize her husband’s political career. The second was about a divorced couple—a chef and a waitress—who by coincidence were hired at the same time by the cruise line and wind up trapped together in the ship’s meat locker. And the third was about a newlywed couple who are prevented by dislocated backs, sunburn, and poison ivy from consummating their wedding vows. I guessed early on that it would be at some point during their disastrously painful attempts to have sex that he would try to set some kind of conversational trap for me, but he was silent throughout each of these, and in the end, it was the divorced couple’s plot that drew his only comment.
During their entrapment in the freezer, they had gone through several stages. First they had tried to busy themselves with escape, interrupting their debates about method with an awkward exchange of news about their lives since the divorce. After the commercial break, they shifted their attention to trying to keep warm. As they ran through options for raising their body temperature, it seemed obvious where this plot was going, but ripe as this inevitable climax might be with opportunities to make me feel awkward in his company, it was at some point during one of the less suggestive conversations that Elliot shook his head and laughed through his nose.
I could sense his eyes sliding in my direction. I tried to guess what he was fishing for, but at the time, it eluded me completely.
“People are so fake,” he said finally.
On-screen, the man was removing his shoes and socks. The woman was sitting on a cardboard box with her arms pulled inside the body of her tuxedo shirt telling him about a movie star who had come into her restaurant.
Elliot said, “They always pretend the opposite of what they’re really feeling.”
The chef pulled his socks over his hands and clapped them together with satisfaction. The waitress kept on with her story: how the actor asked for her phone number; how he invited her to a five-course dinner on his yacht.
Elliot made the noise again. “They never say what they mean. They’re so fake.”
When I felt his eyes settle on me, I nodded, because my agreement seemed important to him, but I felt somehow afraid to engage him with words. Although up until this point he had stolen occasional glances at me, his concentration seemed to deepen during the next scenes. The temptation to simply leave him there absorbed and do the vaguely humiliating snaking job alone was strong, but I suspected he would detect the shame behind this impulse. So instead I waited impatiently for the credits to roll and then clapped my hands and suggested we head upstairs.
Although before he moved into the attic he’d kept his bathroom neat, recently there had been a change. He still put his toothbrush and comb in his medicine cabinet after use, but he didn’t wipe the countertop around the washbasin as he once did. Water pooled there, and in the late afternoon, a faint outline of mineral deposits and the residue of soap marked their outer boundaries. The lower half of his mirror was flecked with toothpaste, and, in the sink basin, short hairs rimmed the drain like iron filings. We kneeled together on his bath mat, and dampness left there by his morning shower bled through the knees of my work pants. I worried that as the same happened to him he would be embarrassed by this. Our elbows touched, and he moved away from me to give me space, one knee on the tile. For a second, I thought I might tell him he wasn’t crowding me. Instead, I said nothing. I was feeding the tip of the snake down the tub drain when he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t meet you.”
“That’s all right.”
“It was irresponsible.”
“It wasn’t so bad; I like hanging out at Briggs.”
When he didn’t say more, I flipped the switch on the snake, and he stared at me as it hummed loudly between us. Then he did a funny thing. He took off his glasses. I didn’t think he could see me clearly when he did this, but my own vision has always been good. It’s difficult for me to know what my son saw.
I waited.
He looked up at the ceiling, and I noted, as I often had in the year since he entered high school, that his throat was no longer a boy’s throat. He swallowed hard, and his Adam’s apple moved inside him, large.
Although he was only a foot from me, the snake was so loud I had to raise my voice a little. I said, “You’re trying to tell me something.”
He laughed, in shock I think. “Yeah.” But then he said nothing.
I said, “This whole thing is a little unsettling.”
He nodded. The snake was turning freely inside the pipe, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn it off.
I said, “It is for me too. It’s frustrating not to know exactly what the problem is.”
In absence of his glasses, I could see that the skin under his eyes was dark, and I had a father’s yearning to set him at ease. Having given voice to something awkward, I thought maybe a change of subject might be the best tactic, but I had trouble thinking of anything uncomplicated to discuss. I sifted through a few options, and finally, I’m embarrassed to say that what came out under pressure was this:
“The FDA approved a new sweetener.”
He looked at me.
“They’re calling it Nutrasweet.”
“Dad,” he said, “I’m thinking about getting a part-time job this summer.”
I tried to steady my voice. “Why?”
He closed his eyes and rubbed them with his thumb and middle finger as if they were sore, but I could see that he was trying to remove traces of moisture. I’d been employed without interruption for twenty-two years, and I’d had three high-paying job offers in the four weeks since my resignation. I had thirty thousand dollars in the bank, and another hundred and fifty in a conservative bond portfolio that a less responsible man would have long since been seduced into selling for fast-moving stocks. We lived in one of the nicest suburbs in Sacramento. We had three new cars. There had been no signs, ever, anywhere in his childhood of financial instability, but, in spite of all of this, somehow in the context of my apparent failures—the plumbing, my job loss, my parenting—I wondered if my son had also begun to doubt our security. I said, “Not for money, surely.”
The fingers stopped on his lids. For a matter of seconds he was perfectly still. Then he put his glasses back on and looked me in the eye. “Yes. It’s the money.”
“Nonsense,” I said.
“Well, I was kind of short on cash this month.”
“Of course you were. You’re getting older. You go out with friends; you have a car. But you can have whatever you need.”
He looked at me. The snake was still turning.
I said, “How much do you need?”
“A hundred dollars.”
“No problem,” I said, and I turned to switch off the snake.
Treating every drain in the house took a little over two hours, and left each bathroom smelling faintly of sewage. Although I tried to let it go, as we worked, I kept tallying the changed features of his private life—different clothes, more meals out, movies and sporting events, extra gas for longer drives than I’d been imagining—and my failure to anticipate the increase in his needs seemed just one more measure of the distance between us. We pulled up some hair, a few orange peels, and once heard a cracking noise that left a few fragments of bright red plastic on the tip of the snake. I made as much of this as I could, ignoring the smell, and when we were finished, tried to undercut the sense of failure stirred by the conversation about money and the strong feeling that nothing conclusive had been learned or solved by declaring it safe to close the windows. We started together in the living room and then split up, and he was already upstairs before I saw that the task would lead us naturally to our bedrooms without saying good night.
I got ready for bed, but instead of trying to sleep, for the first time in weeks, I waited up for Liz to return from the swing shift. I still believed in most ways I had been a good husband. Certainly, she had never complained. Or she only complained, in the midst of our infrequent arguments, about little things: that I was inflexible; that I was too tidy; and once, that I was repressed, although when I pushed her on this point, she would not explain what she meant. While that one always bothered me, I used to try to convince myself that it is one of the things someone says in the heat of argument that is based less on reality than a desire to upset.
We were in the car; Liz was driving, and we were talking about the miscarriages. She had just had a third, and when she forgot to signal at the traffic light, I reached over and did it for her. It’s true that it was not important from a safety standpoint to signal there, but I’d been generally worried about her level of distraction as she talked, and was pleased in some unexamined, reflexive way to be able to do something to supplement her attention to the cause of getting us home. I just reached over and did it.
“Are you even listening to me!?”
“I’ve heard everything you’ve said.”
She looked over both shoulders, too quickly to take anything in. “There’s no one around to even see that signal! We’re alone on the road, and I just told you something amazing; something I’ve spent almost six years trying to find out, and you’re thinking about traffic law.”
“I’m not. It was a reflex. I heard everything you said. If people couldn’t listen and think about driving at the same time, talking in cars would be illegal.”
“There! See! You’re still thinking about traffic law!”
“I’m just proving my point.”
“Then what did I say?”
“You said, ‘Forget about the disappointment, maybe I wasn’t even meant to be a mother.’”
And she burst into tears. There were no cars behind us; so we just sat there at the traffic light. This is what she had said verbatim, and I guessed it must have stung to hear it again. I reached over and took her shoulders in my arms and pulled her towards me. I will admit I was tempted to put the car in park before I did it, I did have that thought, but of course I resisted. It was true there was almost no traffic on the road, and I was frantic to calm her. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
I had meant for the situation, for the fact that we were having so much trouble having a child, but she took it as apology: “It’s the way you say things sometimes. How can you just repeat something that awful like it’s something you read out of the newspaper?”
The possibility that she was sobbing so hard not about the miscarriages, but about me, came as a shock. I pulled back. “You asked me what you said. You asked me.”
“Oh you are so repressed,” she said, and she sat back and put her hands on the wheel.
“What?”
She turned left onto Sunrise Boulevard.
I said, “We were talking about the miscarriages.”
“Babies.”
“Okay, babies.”
Her jaw was set.
I said, “What do you mean?” Neon signs made colors on her face. I said, “That could have been an example of insensitivity, or anal retentiveness, but not repression.”
She did not respond. But later that night, when I asked again, she reached over a hand in the dark and put it to my cheek without even having to grope, and this gesture would almost have been enough on its own, but she also said, “I take it back.” It made me feel better, until the next morning when brushing my teeth alone in the bathroom I realized with a sudden, evidenceless conviction only people who have been married a few years can feel, that she had done this not because she felt her words had been unfair, but because she felt their truth was more than I could take.
The next week, I went with her to a lab in an office tower near the Hyatt. I was holding her hand, and I tried to measure my slight steps to match the pace of the conveyor belt as it eased her body into a big white doughnut. When the doctor found us in the waiting room later and asked us to come to his office, my pulse leapt. Liz’s palm was sweating, but I did not let go. She had three small fibroids, he said, and we had a number of options. Liz interrupted to ask to see the picture on the sheet of acetate he was holding on his crossed knees. When he handed it to her, she held it halfway between us so I could see, but I had a number of questions for the doctor. I ticked resolutely through them: frequency of recurrence after surgery, likelihood of reproductive success, surgical risks and percentage of fibroids that become cancerous. It seemed to me surgery was a good idea, and I turned to her and said so, and she looked up from the shiny sheets then with much the same look she had worn in the car when I flicked the turn signal.
I was thinking about this, sitting up in bed with an open magazine I had not even glanced through, when I finally heard her footfall on the stairs. One twenty-six. My heart quickened when I saw her.
“You’re still up,” she said.
“Yes.”
Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright. She opened her pocket book and took out a roll of butterscotch Lifesavers. “Want one?”
“No, thank you.”
She peeled back a bit of the waxed paper and foil and put one in her mouth. It was a small thing, but I had never seen her take Lifesavers from her purse before. She did not even really eat candy.
“So,” I said. “How was your day?”
She looked at her pocketbook. “Oh, gosh. Same old, same old.”
I didn’t know what she meant, and the realization that in all her descriptions of work I had never noticed a common thread was disconcerting. “The same kind of callers?”
“Mhm.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s see. A woman who said the only time she feels like a whole person is when she’s alone in the bathroom. Her husband’s a urologist, and he thinks she has a bladder infection. That’s why he thinks she goes so often.” She opened and shut her purse again. “Another caller was a man who said whenever he looks in the mirror he sees this very small version of himself. Sometimes when he gets to work he sits in his car for as much as twenty minutes with the engine idling.”
The image of her holding the receiver to her cheek and listening to these strangers’ fears filled me with something I could not name. I said, “That’s a good thing you’re doing.”
She shrugged.
“Really.”
A hand rose to her neck. “Thanks.”
“It’s very kind.”
She took her earrings off—one, and then the other—and palmed them.
I said, “Do you enjoy it at all—listening to those people’s problems?”
“It feels like the right thing to do.”
“I mean for your own sake.”
“Not really,” she said. She took her necklace off with two hands, like a yoke. She was still wearing her clothes, her shoes; her pocketbook lay on the bedspread; but somehow this removal made her look naked. Maybe it was the way she held herself—shyly—as she never did when she took off her robe to step into the shower or surprised me by pulling back the bedsheet to expose her own bareness, but as she often did when I asked her to remove the towel she had pressed to her body or lingered by the door of the closet to watch her undress. Her eyes fluttered from me. “I mean, of course not. No.”
I wondered for the first time if she might shower before coming to bed, and when she did not, a sickening, double-agent’s kind of courage came to me. She slipped between the sheets, and I pulled her towards me beneath them to check for another man’s smell. Her muscles tensed, at first, in surprise, but then she buried her face in my neck, and the soft sweep of her nose and lips against the skin there brought first relief, and then panic, and then shame. All three of them stayed. She sat me up and removed my shirt. In my excitement closing the windows, I had done a teenager’s job on the shades, and now the barest trace of moonlight through the new elm leaves graced her arms and cheek before she laid us down again. In a weird act of will, I made myself imagine how her control might excite another man. But then I lost track of all of these feelings until afterwards when exhaustion came and laid a heavy blanket on my thoughts and limbs that only the most persistent kind of anxiety can invade. Sarah, it said. Sarah.
I drifted off, but woke an hour later sharing a pillow with my wife, and somehow her hair against my lips, and the smell of butterscotch from her open mouth filled me with a mixture of sadness and panic that sent my heart racing. I had only felt this feeling a handful of times in my adult life, but long ago I had found a way of dispelling it. Our basement was a space of which I was particularly proud, and part of what made this exercise so helpful was that I had to pass through a room I had made so well. Most basements lack sufficient headroom to allow for the installation of a drop ceiling and a plywood subfloor, but my basement is very deep. I ran all the water supply lines through joists behind the Sheetrock and hid the enormous soil pipe by boxing it in with boards stained and joined to make it appear almost indistinguishable from a wooden ceiling beam. And although most basements are damp and cold, by doing the job myself, I was able to ensure good weatherproofing. In particular, I chose to seal the exterior wall of the foundation rather than the interior one, which is more reliable for two reasons. Hydrostatic pressure, exerting force towards the center of the house as it does, tends to push against the surface of, and therefore tighten, exterior sealers, while pushing against the base of, and therefore loosen, those applied to the interior wall. Maybe even more important, exterior sealants prevent moisture from penetrating even the outer layer of the wall, thus providing several additional inches of security. As a general rule, history has taught us to protect a structure as far from the locus of vulnerability as possible.
When I got to the bottom of the stairs that night, I stood there, as I often did, and visualized the pipes and wires running behind the pure white walls. When I opened the mechanical closet door, the light came on automatically, and there was just enough room for me to step in on either side of the machines. Mounted on the wall was a hand vacuum. Once a month, I went there to remove dust and dirt from the closet floor. I tightened the pipe fittings and the packing nuts on the centrifugal pump to keep it from losing its prime. I cleaned the air shutter on the hot-water heater to assure the proper supply of air to burner and pilot light. I polished the contacts on the furnace thermostat with fine sandpaper to remove dirt.
But that night, I did none of these things. It was not what I’d come for. The space behind the furnace was barely wide enough to take my hand, but it was easy to find my way. High in the wall was a hole, four inches by four, that I cut before I installed the furnace. I reached in and pulled out the biscuit tin, and as I removed the lid, the furnace ticked and sighed into motion. Though it was unlikely, I always worried that one of them had found it—run fingers along its checkered grip and drawn wrongheaded conclusions about a life I had kept secret from them. But at the time I didn’t really believe I had a secret life. I thought I was merely protecting them. Guns are dangerous, and moreover, it wasn’t even mine.
I took it out of the tin, surprised, as I always was, by how heavy it seemed to me. It was a Colt Service Model Ace .22 with a ten-round detachable magazine. One day, I had crept into my parents’ bedroom and copied the serial number into my notebook because I thought knowing its provenance might help me understand my father. It did not, but it did tell me he had probably spent too much, even in 1953. Production on the model had stopped after the war, and the scarcity was just beginning to inflate the price of them. I might have sold it easily years ago, just to rid myself of the worry that Elliot might find it and come to some harm. But by throwing all of the bullets away, I was able to convince myself it was safe enough to keep it. Although the warmest emotion I harbor for my father is pity, the truth is, this was one thing of his I really wanted to own. Superstitious as it was, for me, over the years, his pistol had become a sort of talisman. At those few times in my life when, lying in bed next to my sleeping wife, I had felt the beginnings of genuine fear or sadness building inside me, I had gone down to the basement and removed the gun from the hole. There in the dark, I held it in two hands with my back against the furnace room door, and at the precise moment when my breathing slowed and my pulse became itself again, I put the pistol back where it belonged, unloaded and hidden in my basement wall. In this way the gun was a reminder. It was a reminder of how deeply I differed from the kind of man who would burden his family with knowledge of his petty needs and sorrows.
AS I SAID, LIZ’S SCHEDULE NOW AT THE CRISIS CENTER INCLUDED forty hours a week. They’d lost another volunteer, she’d said, and she felt bad for her coordinator, as well as for the callers. When she said this, she looked at me squarely. Our marriage had given me no opportunity to learn what she might look like were she to lie to me. I’d seen her do so once to someone else, a store clerk just after we were married. She had purchased a pair of shorts with LOVE embroidered across the backside, and the zipper broke the next day when she stooped to pick up a flat of strawberry plants at the nursery. When she tried to return them, he said he could only accept the return of unworn merchandise, and without blinking she said it had broken when she tried them on for her husband. In the parking lot, she filled the space in which we might have talked about it with a rant about a mother she’d seen yanking her son’s arm in the aisles, and although I knew why she had lied, in fact, respected her motives, it was several hours before the smoothness with which she had done so lost its hold on my imagination.
The Crisis Center was in downtown Sacramento, and on my way to two separate appointments, I might have stopped by to say hello. On the first of these, I left home early and parked so that I’d have to pass its door. I looked for her car, and when I didn’t see it, I began to circle the block to find it, but as I passed by a children’s shoe store and saw a woman inside kneeling on the floor to squeeze the sides of her son’s sneakers, I was overcome by such deep shame I turned in place and hurried on to my meeting. A week later when an interview again took me to her part of town during her shift, I left home with the plan of dropping in with barbecue, and when I reached the door it was not guilt this time but sadness that stopped me. This was my wife. I ate my sandwich alone in César Chávez Park and set hers on a bench beside me before leaving, opening the flaps of waxed paper wide for the birds.
In the end, I learned her secret not through spying, but instead by accident. An early proposal for a very expensive and unnecessary modification to my dam had been voted down, but in the newspaper days later there was an anonymous editorial that suggested this was a mistake we would all live or die to regret. The letter was crazy, and mentioned apocalypse, but one or two lines made it clear that this person had at least some knowledge of structural engineering, and although I’ve come to feel certain the author was a stranger to me, at the time I couldn’t help but wonder if it had been written by Belsky.
It might be a measure of how much things had changed that when I read it at breakfast that morning I didn’t snap the paper with exaggerated flourish and read the crazy diatribe aloud. Instead, I felt a little flare of panic, not that the editorial would influence their opinion about my work in any way, but at the thought that this kind of humor and casual talk on topics related to my career were somehow now beyond us. I turned to the front of the section to monopolize it throughout the meal.
When we finished breakfast, I set it on top of the others. I didn’t really care if they read it, just if they read it with me around. But in the next days, I found myself preoccupied with curiosity about whether Liz too had seen it and felt at a loss about how to handle the joking it warranted. The question took on an importance in my mind that I can scarcely explain except to say that it’s been my experience that generalized anxiety feeds best on smaller objects.
I don’t know what made me think I might be able to tell, looking at the discarded newspaper, whether she had read it. The garage was cold, and my breath hovered in white puffs and disappeared as I leaned over the plastic bin. I felt a bolt of irritation when I lifted the lid. We’d had chicken the night before, and the carcass sat loosely wrapped in a piece of newspaper, covered in its own jelly. Liz always emptied the garbage neatly. Even a single item, such as a ham bone, was wrapped in plastic and tied off before deposit into the can because ever since her first pregnancy she’d had a sensitive nose. It hadn’t even been his job to empty the garbage last night—it had been an act of unsolicited courtesy on his part—but still I felt annoyed, picturing his untied sneaker tapping the gas pedal, two fingers resting on the wheel as he drifted into the left lane.
I set the carcass aside and began drawing out white plastic bags, neatly fastened by Liz with yellow plastic cable ties. The newspapers slid between them, and it had been cold enough the night before that the chicken smell was not rotten but fresh. It made my stomach growl, and my irritation flared again. Tuesday Sports. Monday Front Page. Tuesday Business. Saturday Home. Some had been discarded inside out after reading, and this made it more difficult to find what I was looking for. Bright, slippery coupons for car washes, hair color, honey-baked ham. It had been in the Friday Metro section, I thought. But before I found it, something else caught my eye. Liz’s red ink on a page of Classifieds.
I stood up straight and set them on the hood of my car, but immediately I knew that this was her secret. What struck me first was the variety of the things she had circled: Assistant Bookkeeper, Clothing Sales, Librarian, Pet Sales, Prep Cook, Teaching Assistant, Tutor. Some of them had check marks next to phone numbers—the job as a prep cook at a restaurant near the capitol; the clothing sales position and a teaching assistant’s job at a preschool in Carmichael. What was disturbing about it was not that she had looked for a job, but that she had kept it to herself—whether because the distance between us made it difficult to explain, or because she thought her motives for doing so might hurt me.
I separated the sheet from its section and folded it small. My drive had weakened somewhat, but I continued searching until I found the editorial. The section had been folded open to this page, and there was a small dribble of tea alongside it that told me that indeed she had read it. I tore it free of the paper and folded this too, as small as the want ads, and returned the garbage to its can. Then I headed back to the house.
Bad moments that year were plentiful, and so it might seem fruitless to try to select front-runners from among them, but coming as it did at the end of a line of so many, and bearing the weight of all their discouragement, I think it is possible that the most dispiriting of all was opening my front door just then and smelling sewer gas. It was not really a comfort to me that neither of them was home, and I will be honest and say it took a great deal of self-control just then not to open the windows by shattering them. But of course I didn’t. I moved through the house sliding them open in casings I’d sanded with three grades of paper. Then I took a ball of twine from the kitchen drawer and lowered one end down the powder room drain. When it came up dry, I let the faucet run a few seconds to fill it and stepped outside.
Even through three years of selfish testing, my father had maintained his house in Trenton with uncommon pride and obsessive care, but in the frozen spring of my junior year he began its destruction with something small. He let the faucet leak. At first, I thought he didn’t notice, and I was afraid of shaming him by pointing it out. Maybe my mother was also. We ate our meals listening to it dripping in the background until there was a second sign. He let a pinpoint of rust in the tub basin spread like a sore in the enamel. A lightbulb burned out and stayed burned out. Once, my mother tried to change it, but when my father saw her, he said, “I’ll do that, Lucille. I’ve been busy, but I’m not incompetent.” Our house grew darker. The Austrian clock wound down. Keeping time, too, was my father’s job, and my mother did not even attempt to do it for him. Finally, when his service van broke down that summer, he did not repair it. He began idling around the house.
It’s hard now to explain exactly why I didn’t move to fix anything myself, except that as he began to betray us, my mother’s model of love was all I had. The more oppressive our passivity grew, the more I longed simply to leave, and this is probably why I chose a college so far away. It was the anticipation of this escape that allowed me finally to feel critical of her. I remember one night she and I were in the kitchen, examining two different jars she held up to a candle. She was making soup, and the aspirin and the bouillon tablets she bought came in similar bottles. She was trying to read them in a room full of burned-out bulbs neither of us could bring ourselves to replace. It had been four years since he had begun doing drastic things to provoke her, staying out late night after night and buying a gun and making up lovers, and now there was this.
“Why don’t you ever get angry?” I said.
She kept looking at the jars, but she stopped turning them in the light. Maybe it was surprise at the first verbal acknowledgment between us that there was anything wrong with him. Or maybe it was just the first time it had occurred to her that she might get angry. After a few seconds, she turned to me. “Some people need to see your love more than you need to see theirs.”
Although at the time I would never have admitted this, even to myself, it was a relief to leave her. I stayed away as much as I could, with the excuses of money for travel and commitment to my studies, until I relied so thoroughly on my detachment for happiness that even a phone call from her felt like an invasion. By the time she called me in May of my sophomore year, the feeling of guilt and sorrow her voice stirred in me was familiar.
“How’s school?” she said.
“Good. Exams are coming up next week—”
“I should call back then.”
“No, no…” Through the wires, I heard the Austrian clock tolling. She was sitting in my father’s chair, I knew. I said, “How are you? How’s your sewing?”
“I’m making a dress for Aunt Lynn.”
“Oh?”
“It’s like the one I made for Jenny.”
“And Dad?”
“Not good.”
I didn’t know what to say to this. Just before I left home two years before, I had seen her break something intentionally. He had passed an entire dinner without speaking a word to either one of us, and afterwards, when she was alone in the kitchen with her back to the hall door, she held a plate at shoulder height over the kitchen sink for a few seconds, her arms outstretched, and just let go. Then she put on a pair of rose-pruning gloves and wrapped the pieces in newspaper and took them to the garbage can at the curb. There was that memory to turn to, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her express her pain with words. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Actually,” she said, and stopped. The clock had finished. There was a click in my mother’s throat. “Actually, he had a heart attack, Luther.”
“He what?”
“He’s dead.”
There was a moment of silence then, during which, to my surprise, I felt the beginning of tears. I covered the mouthpiece on the receiver with my hand until the feeling passed. Then I said, “I’ll be home tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” she said.
When I arrived, I found the front door unlocked, and a small stalagmite of sodden plaster obstructed the entryway. Rain had leaked through the light fixture, and he had not fixed it. My mother was in the kitchen, making deviled eggs by candlelight. I set my suitcase on the floor and took up a pastry tube full of the cooked yolk to help. She placed pimentos after me. She wanted to know what of my father’s things I wanted to take with me for sentimental reasons, and it’s a clear failure of character that I did not pretend to want anything. I forced her to make suggestions: his watch, his good winter coat, his tools. She asked me several times that first day, and I could only tell her I would think about it, but in my mildew-scented room that night, I could think of nothing he had owned that did not make me angry.
The following morning, she told me she was going to the grocery store to buy more food for the funeral reception, and four hours later, I found her there in the frozen-food aisle, a glass door propped open by her body, her breath and the steam off her coat clouding the glass. She was holding a frozen spinach soufflé in one hand and her purse in the other. “What about his pocket knife?” she said, and it is a dark secret of mine that what I felt at that moment was a fear mixed not with sympathy but with irritation. How could she mourn him? I led her to the cash register, her wool coat cool from the freezer, and when I took her wallet from her purse, I saw that beneath it lay my father’s gun.
This, then, was what I asked for. It is a sign that I’d judged the severity of her mental state correctly that she did not even worry over why I wanted it myself. We buried him the next morning, and I stayed two more weeks to move her things to her parents’ house in Princeton, and when I returned to school, I spent a restless night getting out of bed to flip on the fluorescent lights and reposition the pistol. First I hid it under the mattress at the head of my bed, but in that state between half-sleep and dreams when worry is still active but the line between reality and fiction is gone, I imagined the gun misfiring into the base of my skull. It kept me from sleeping. I sat up in bed and rested my hands on my knees. I moved it into my desk drawer. Then I worried about someone finding it there—a fire inspection. Surely it was against university regulations to keep firearms in the dorm rooms. I checked its chamber again for bullets. Finally, I put it in a small square biscuit tin and slipped it in the deep pocket of the winter coat my mother had insisted I take with me. This is where it stayed, untouched in my closet, until that strobe of police lights on my ceiling in Sacramento two years later. Funny; a burglary in the building might have made me want to keep a gun in my apartment, to protect myself, but instead I wanted only to hide it. When I examine the impulse, it seems there were two emotions behind it. One was fear of loss, and the other was shame at the way my attachment to an unloaded pistol marked me as my father’s son.
When I arrived to open my account, Liz was sitting behind a wooden desk in front of the vault, trifolding sheets of paper into envelopes. The Wells Fargo Bank on J Street had large windows, and when I entered the bank for the first time, the room was warm with early sun. I was wearing the winter coat, and when I approached her desk, I was sweating. She licked her finger before she separated another page from her stack. Although she seemed a businesslike distance from me when seated, she stood as I cleared my throat to speak, bringing her face startlingly close to mine.
“Yes?” she said.
“I want to rent a safe-deposit box.”
She opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a form. When she sat, I did too and began to fill it out, my pulse racing. I could feel the weight of the gun on my hip. I said, “Who besides me will have access to the box?”
“Nobody. It takes two keys to open, and you’ve got one of them.”
“The bank doesn’t have copies of the customer keys?”
She cocked her head. “Well, sure, but we can’t open it without your permission.”
“Who has access to those keys?”
“Without a signature from you? Just the bank president, I’m guessing.” She smiled at me. “But then again, my dad’s the bank president, so I could cop it while he’s sleeping and snoop through your drawer no problem.”
I must have looked stricken because she said, “Relax! I’m only kidding!”
When I went back to my apartment that night, I regretted leaving the pistol in the vault. Between the sweating and the interrogation and the panicky looks, I had acted so suspiciously, I was sure that she would open the box to see what I had been so eager to protect. I might simply have retrieved the gun and closed the account the next morning, but I’ll admit already I was drawn to her, and somehow the solution of going often enough to become something less than a lunatic to her compelled me.
The next day, I stopped by a pawn shop and purchased four rolls of wheat pennies and set them in a biscuit tin similar to the one that contained my father’s pistol. I did this half-a-dozen times, until finally, with the boldness I was counting on, she asked me what was in the tin, and I lifted the lid, printed with a scene of snowy New England, to let her see. I think it was then, after a bell’s peal of laughter that made heads turn in the teller line, that she asked me out for that dinner.
Now, standing alone on my front lawn waiting for the sewer smell to dissipate, I had the strange thought that were it not for my father’s pistol, I might have lived alone in this house, without dread or confusion about the way my crimes of emotion were yielding results so similar to his own.
I went inside and closed all of the windows. The smell was gone, but as I began to puzzle through the evidence again, I felt a sort of exhaustion. Hiring a plumber to repeat the time-consuming battery of tests I’d already performed was very unlikely to yield a better answer than I had been able to come up with myself, and seemed a concession of defeat. And finally—of course it no longer seems strange now—I thought of the one person to whom I felt I had nothing left to concede.
When I arrived in the parking lot, I stood outside for a moment, looking in. Larry’s wife stood at the counter watching her television. She had dumped the contents of her purse on the counter, and she was pawing through them without looking. When her hand found a container of Tic Tacs, she flipped it open, shook one into her palm, and popped it in her mouth. I pushed through the door, and she gestured at the screen as if I had been there with her watching all along. “Sisters who’re best friends, what do you think about that?”
“Excuse me?”
“These are my favorites. They do it all the time. Happy people who love each other silly. By the end, they’re holding them in their chairs.” She rolled her eyes. “How’s your boy?”
“He’s fine.”
“What did I tell you?” She winked. “So what’s the problem. Another clog?”
And here I surprised myself. Although I would have expected it to embarrass me to do so, instead of answering her, I looked down at the counter at the contents of her purse—a dirty pink wallet, a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, Chap Stick, Tic Tacs, a brush fleeced with a mat of her hair, dental floss, a wrapped tampon, some change. I am sixty-five years old and I think I have a glimmer of understanding now, but for many years any memory of this meeting with Larry’s wife made me feel some combination of discouragement and vertigo—a brief panicky glimpse at the unfathomable Rube Goldberg workings that controlled my mind and heart. I had come for her help, and although every element that had so annoyed me in our previous encounters was magnified here—her inappropriate familiarity, her condescension, her vulgar jokes about human nature—somehow under the very circumstances when they should have unnerved me the most they did not bother me at all. They were almost a comfort.
“Tic Tac?” she said.
“Sure.”
She picked up the box and shook one into my palm. I put it in my mouth. She took a second one for herself and said, “So what kind of trouble have you got yourself into this time?”
“A little case of trap-seal loss,” I said.
She cracked the mint between her molars. “Could be an arm-over vent in the attic full of water. Larry’s brother saw that once.”
“I already opened the wall to check for sagging.”
“Yikes. You have been busy. Well, it’s one of six things. Design error, which is my bet. Or if the design is decent, somewhere in there you probably jimmied something.”
“I don’t think—”
“Well, how old’s your house?”
“Twenty-two years.”
“That’s a lot of time for mistakes. A repair or a new sink or something. You’re in here a lot after all.” She smiled slyly. “I could come take a look if you want.”
“What are the other five?”
She counted them off on her fingers: “Piece of string drawing water down the drain. Evaporation, which isn’t likely. Clogged vent, like I said. Cracked drain pipe. You’ve done the smoke test already; where’d the smoke come out?”
“Just the vent.”
“You could’ve missed some spots.”
“What’s the sixth?”
“What?”
“You said there were six.”
She looked at her fingers. “Oh, yeah. It never happens. I’ve never heard of it once. It was just in the book we had to read for the boys’ licensing exam.”
“What is it?”
“Wind effect.” She shook her head. “Supposedly wind can get channeled down the vent and suck the trap empty. But I think the botched repair’s more likely. It said the wind thing was rare, and it doesn’t seem like the type of thing that would just start happening all of a sudden. Something about the roof design has to whip it down there.”
My chest filled. “Actually, I added two dormers last summer.”
“And a do-it-yourself bathroom maybe?”
“Let’s say it was wind effect….”
She rolled her eyes.
I said, “Is there something simple that can be done to stop it from happening again?”
She laughed.
I said, “Maybe something you can sell me?”
“Now you’re talkin’. How about trap primers?”
“Trap primers?”
“They use them mostly in public bathrooms on the traps under floor drains. The drains are required, but they don’t get much use unless a toilet overflows; so the seal evaporates. The primer taps the supply line for a little water whenever it gets low,” she said. She picked up the box of Tic Tacs and handed it to me. Then she stepped around the counter to lead me to the back of the store.
It would be difficult to characterize the relief I felt except to say that it’s the kind I’ve experienced only a few times in my life, a kind of flight inside the chest and a buzzing in the skull that even in a person driving alone in a car can produce a sudden, irrepressible bubble of laughter. I switched the radio on, and when I found something vaguely triumphant, I turned it loud. All week a sense of loss I’d been channeling unexamined into paranoia had me imagining Liz greeting other people’s children at some preschool or whispering over a table in a bistro to a man named Rudy. It held me back from any kind of action, and something in me knew that whatever the truth was, an affair or a job, the only path towards eliminating these secrets began with conversation. I had resolved sometime in the middle of last night to try to initiate more of this, and now when I parked outside the Crisis Center and looked up at the window above, I tried to picture her there, listening to a stranger’s worries across the telephone lines because I would not share my own. A pigeon lit on the brick sill outside the window and struggled for balance. A boy spilled a bag of fried chicken on the sidewalk and birds swarmed around him, a cloud of dark wings. In the end, it was simply the sudden thought that Liz might not be there at all—might be pursuing her own secret life—that made me lose my will. It seemed more than my fragile excitement could bear.
Instead, I drove to the bank to withdraw the money Elliot had said he needed. Over the last two days, I had given it some thought. He was a smart boy, and although we had never discussed it directly, I was pretty sure that if asked he could make a fair guess about the size of my savings. In hindsight it seemed much more likely that his impulse to get a job had stemmed from a genuine feeling that I was too far removed from his life now to be able to imagine the urgency he attached to his new social expenses. I will admit that it was mostly competitive insecurity about the implications of this that made me want to surprise him with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.
He was home when I got there, eating a bowl of Cheerios at the kitchen table. He looked up at me when I came through the door.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello.” I put my hand in my pocket. “I’ve got that money for you.”
“What money?” he said.
He has grown into a kind and respectful man. He has two small children of his own now, both of whom will consent to being comforted by him when injured even if their mother is also available. I wish I could by some miracle have known this then. It might have given me better access to my sympathy for him, because as it was, within seconds any tenderness I felt was obscured almost totally by anger. I closed my eyes for a second. Behind the walls of a house, I told myself, pipes do not always run straight….
I said, “The money you needed a part-time job to earn.”
“Oh, right,” he said.
It wasn’t until then that it occurred to me that he didn’t really need the money, and in retrospect, what amazes me most is not his lie, but that it took me so long to identify it. I can, I suppose, claim some counterbalancing shrewdness in the fact that by two thirty that morning standing barefoot on my lawn listening to the strangely stressful pulse of crickets, it had occurred to me that it was not the only lie he had told me.
The next morning, I stopped by Nathan’s office unannounced. He was eating breakfast from McDonald’s: hash browns fried into an oval and served in a paper sleeve. He had just taken a bite—too hot—and he made a little “o” of his mouth to cool it.
I said, “Listen, I won’t stay long, but I wanted you to know that I feel I’ve made a mistake.”
He finished chewing and swallowed. “What?”
“I’m embarrassed by my vacillation, but all I can say is my son has been going through a tough time, and I overreacted worrying about the travel. If you’ve still got an opening, I’d like to reapply.”
He set his hash browns down. “You’re killing me, Luther. We offered it to the guy from L.A. the day after you turned us down. He starts next week.”
“I understand. I figured that was probably the case.”
“And he’s a good guy, too.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“He turned down Bechtel for us.”
I nodded. Outside, rain had just started. It had been so dry lately, the soil in the empty median planters had turned to dust, and the big drops stirred it, little plumes of red smoke. It was a strange sight.
He said, “Candidly? I’d rather have you because I’ve worked with you before. You’re a known quantity. That’s why I offered it to you first. But I can’t back out of the offer.”
“I understand.”
“I mean, technically? I could do it, but I won’t.”
“I respect that.”
The rain was loud, and he looked over his shoulder to see it. “Looks like a big one.”
“Yes.”
We both watched it a minute. Over the last few months, even the sight of clouds had made me tense, but last night I had installed the trap primers while Elliot tinkered with the drive train for a go-kart in the basement. Then I had closed all the windows. I used the thought of this to soothe myself—to slow my heart.
“Shoot, Luther,” Nathan said.
“I know.” I wiped my palms on my thighs. “I don’t suppose you could use two people.”
He laughed. He shook his head, eyeing me. “It’s just not in the budget.”
“I could work for a percentage of the business I bring in for a while.”
“You’re killing me again.”
I held up a hand. “I understand.”
He took another bite of his hash browns now, cool enough to allow him to consume half the oval in a single bite. My heart fluttered inside my chest. Something about the way he chose to take a bite then instead of thanking me for stopping by. I could tell he was thinking about it. “The truth is we probably can use the help.”
I waited.
“There’s this big job we’re about to land. I never thought they’d give it to us, but if they do, we’re going to be stretched really thin.”
I said nothing.
“You could have a job with anyone looking, Luther. You really want me to call you if we get the contract?”
I scratched my chin in an effort to make it appear I was weighing this, but the truth is the odd carrel of loneliness I had erected for myself in the busy front-room of my family life made me yearn with unreasonable urgency for a second chance at a job with him—a man who could not inhibit himself even from eating fried potatoes to keep his heart from bursting. It seemed best to hide this.
“Sure,” I said. “I want to take the right thing with the right company. I’m going to keep talking to people, but call me when you know, and we’ll see where I am.”
“Okay.” He lifted the empty white paper bag and peered inside as if looking for more food. The meeting was over, and a stronger man might have risen and left at this point, but my curiosity overwhelmed me. I told myself it would be useful in my dealings with Elliot to know for sure.
I took that box of Tic Tacs from my pocket and opened it. I put one in my mouth and set the box on his desk. Then I said, “I ran into Robert yesterday.”
He reached across the table for the Tic Tacs. “Who?”
“Belsky.”
He put a mint in his mouth and furrowed his brow, thinking. “I’m terrible with names.”
“He worked in Design with us at the Department.”
“The guy with the limp?”
“No, that was Burt Sage. He left a while ago. Belsky’s the one with the red hair and the really loud laugh.”
“Loud laugh,” he said. “I guess I don’t remember him.”