Alexandra Chen had once told Lyle Michaels anyone fortunate enough to have an irritating father was fortunate enough to have a father. It was just the sort of tautological thing she’d say. Besides, after the CUNY journalism panel, he was not ready for Frank.
He was hanging around a municipal trash can, smoking cigarettes. Bri Freeman had just arrived, and he was narrating the blow-by-blow. The editor of the Trib had looked right at him as he said “blogs” profited on repackaging real journalists’ original reporting. Looked right at him as he said Lyle’s employer, Noze, acted as a platform for unverified information—and what happens when you become an open microphone for the craziest thing a crazy person will do or say? What happens to our politics? He was telling Bri Freeman all that when he saw his father approach but didn’t let on until it was precisely necessary, not until Frank raised his arms, here I am, a lumbering rectangle in plaid.
“Hello,” Frank said. “Come stai, baby?” Frank said.
Lyle exhaled. “Dad, this is Bri Freeman.”
Hand out, half bow. “And you’re a website writer too?”
“From the program, Dad,” he said. “Which is to say, contrary to popular belief in the Michaels household, other people also choose to spend a lot of time at half-filled seminar tables.”
“Which is to say listen to this one announce his intellectual affiliations. Naturally, even Lyle’s affiliations were disaffiliations. He criticized the consensus view no matter what the consensus view was.”
Frank squinted. “You drop out like my son too?”
They had not spoken since his father told him he didn’t know a single person with a baby on the way out of an annulled marriage, not one who wouldn’t try to make it work with someone one in a million like Ingrid. Lyle did not know why Frank had come, but here he was acting the status quo. Lyle grabbed the strap of a bag from Bri’s shoulder, arcing it over his head so that it rested diagonally across his own torso.
“Oh no, Bri abandoned me,” he said. “For Los Angeles and the tenure track.”
“It wasn’t me,” Bri said. “It was al-Qaeda. The departments have money for the Middle East suddenly. I can’t complain.”
“Just teach the future military advisors. Make the neoliberal case for the humanities.”
“I missed you too, Ly,” she said.
Lyle raised his eyebrows at Frank. “Missed me so much she missed the whole damn panel.”
Her fingernail polish was chipped, and there was an ugly watch on her wrist, and it suited her. That way she had of drawing one shoulder to her chin, nonplussed, untouchable. He hadn’t seen her in over a year. “My flight was delayed.”
“I think Lyle beat him,” Frank said.
“It wasn’t a debate, Dad. Nobody wins.”
“But you still beat him,” Frank said.
“All right, Dad.” Lyle pinched the skin between his eyebrows.
By stance, Lyle knew into his father’s mind. He could see his father shifting feet, the way he did when he refused to take painkillers for his back. For years, his mother had been hectoring Frank that the hours had to stop, and Frank, insisting on referring to the family not as the Michaelses but as the Micellis, told her the Micellis had always worked. Lyle had given up on that argument years ago. He turned back to Bri again.
“So what I was saying was, I told him at Noze we are not buying Walter Lippmann–style snobbery. I said the implicit value is citizen report. I said our ethos is it is as much news as all the print journalism dispelled by the Iraq War, by Judith Miller and her imaginary WMDs.”
“Very Arendt,” Bri said. “‘If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.’”
“‘And with such a people,’” Lyle continued, “‘you can then do what you please.’”
Frank cleared his throat. “You know, I speak a little Spanish myself.”
“What are you talking about, Dad? Where’s Mom?”
“Buying ibuprofen. Her headaches, you know.”
“The Joan Didion of Bayside, my mother,” Lyle said, adding, “minus the writing, minus the California and the Vogue.”
“A smoker with migraines.”
“And minus the cigarettes.”
The paper program from the event was still in Frank’s hand, rolled up. He smacked it against his thigh, a signal to go, but Lyle did not acknowledge it. In his peripheral, Frank shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“You look at the internet and here is an opportunity to make information free to everyone except the advertisers. That’s something academics’ve never understood. They always think the higher the markup, the more knowledge means.”
Bri snapped open her lighter, another cigarette tucked into a weird miniaturized smile. “You ever miss it?”
“So I can spend years writing the conference papers, the journal articles, and who will read them: eight and a half people if you count the one who doesn’t finish?”
An ironic eyebrow. “You think all eight would read front to back?”
“Not even my mother.”
A wing of oversized shirt spread as she drew on the cigarette, paused, then with maddening languor said, “Don’t ask permission or forgiveness. It’s your choice. But don’t insult mine either.”
“I didn’t mean,” Lyle said, and stopped. He looked away. He looked at the ground. He looked at his father. “Why don’t you go wait for Mom at the truck?” Lyle said. “I’ll catch up with you at the house later.”
“But I’m just getting to know your friend,” Frank said.
“Bri’s specialty is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman expansionism,” Lyle said, very stiff, formal.
“Ottoman. So what are you?”
“Don’t answer that, Bri,” Lyle said, and to Frank, “What is wrong with you?”
His father threw his arms up in right angles of surrender. “All I want to know is who I’m talking to.”