Sixteen

 

A typical LA evening, cooling suddenly as the sun went down, as if into another season. Charlie helped Angeliki set the table outside, under the fig tree that got mobbed by parakeets every fall. Even in December figs were scattered on the lawn, rupturing into little pink geodes. A few lonely grapefruit, too, from the oro blanco tree shading the hill that ran down to the neighbors’ bamboo fence. Charlie, who didn’t much care for figs or grapefruit, admired his shady yard nonetheless and thought about how he’d fallen in love with it at first sight, when he and Angeliki were house hunting. She’d been pregnant with Téa at the time, and mostly what he’d dreamed about was exactly this: the four of them having dinner outdoors, on the rare night he wasn’t working or on call, Charlie and Angeliki picking fresh fruit to feed to their children. He’d shared this Edenic fantasy with Angeliki at the time. What he hadn’t shared with her was the other fantasy drifting through his brain: the look of envy on Cece’s face if she were to ever somehow visit them in LA. She loved the fruit trees in Montana so much.

He’d meant to take her to the orchard last year, when he’d asked Cece and Garrett to the lake—to rub it in? dazzle her with apples?—but the sight of her had knocked him sideways, turned his elaborate plans for the day to mush.

“Charlie,” Téa said, raising her arms to him. She had Angeliki’s green eyes, pupils ringed with little brown specks, like the inside of a kiwi. He picked his daughter up and put her on her booster seat.

“Why do you call me that?”

“What?”

“Charlie. Instead of ‘Dad.’ ”

Téa shrugged. “Mom calls you ‘Charlie.’ ”

“It’s sweet,” Angeliki said. “You’re her best friend.”

Charlie nodded, though he knew this wasn’t the case. Secretly, he worried it was because he worked too much. He wasn’t around enough to be a dad. Not that Angeliki didn’t work hard too—she was in high demand these days, often juggling two or three design projects at once—but she was out of the house every afternoon by three thirty, in time to get Téa from preschool. He turned to Jasper, whose eyes were on him from across the table.

“Hi, Chuck,” Jasper said to him, then burst out laughing. Téa smiled along.

“See, it’s a conspiracy,” Charlie said.

How lovely it could be when the kids didn’t fight. They ate their hamburgers in the exact same way, Téa copying Jasper’s technique, peeling her bun off so that a white gauze of bread stuck to the meat before eating the burger separately. Not very many things felt magical to Charlie—he was a doctor, a gospeler of science—but a peaceful dinner came close. You expected it at any moment to collapse, but by some extraordinary luck the kids were both in good moods, generous with each other, calm and grateful and uncompetitive. It was like reading a book about your family, one of those novels that make you long for the expensive life inside it, where the father comes home from work and dazzles his kids with jokes and presents. They drank wine in these books and never got mean or tired. Maybe they ate a quince in the dappled light.

One of the herons nesting in the sycamore by the garage began to bark like a demented dog. Charlie wasn’t sure what conservationists were doing to the LA River—“revitalizing” it somehow—but recently a heron family had moved onto their property, waking them up at dawn and dropping half-eaten meals in their backyard. Often Charlie had to clean up a giant carp head from the lawn or risk pureeing it with the mower. Were herons endangered? Was it normal for them to be living in the middle of the city, reclaiming their ancestral lands, like the coyotes you sometimes saw jogging down the middle of the street? Or was this the beginning of the end, an omen of the apocalypse? He’d been meaning to ask Garrett about it, but every time he picked up the phone to call, he remembered his performance at the lake last summer and blushed with shame.

Of course, he thought of the mother osprey in Montana, that time he’d scared away an eagle and saved her chicks. Except he’d done it for Cece: he was just following orders. The truth is, the herons were annoying, they kept him awake sometimes after an all-nighter at the OR, they made a god-awful racket and smelled up the yard. A shotgun, now, might have come in handy.

Doing the dishes, Charlie blasted a dumb song he’d loved as a kid—“Just What I Needed” by the Cars—and was abducted by happiness. He started to dance. Well, that might be overstating it, to call it dancing. It was more dance-adjacent. The kids came in from the yard and saw him doing something nonessential with his legs. Daddy! Jasper said, pretending to be embarrassed but clearly thrilled. It had never crossed their minds that their father would try to dance. He might as well have turned into a bear. He was a tired man, wonderful when he was around but often on his way to work or bed, stage-hooked by phone calls, prone to falling asleep on the floor of their room when he was supposed to be playing Legos. He always seemed like he’d just gotten back from another planet, too rocket-lagged to stand up.

But here he was, singing along to the stereo while swiveling his hips. A well-rested father is maybe the best thing in the world. The kids started to dance too. When Angeliki came in from the porch, they were all three bent over shaking their asses.

“Catch an egg and shave it,” she said, wide-eyed.

This was a Greek expression that didn’t translate well, or at least Charlie had never really understood it. Much of the mystery left in their marriage revolved around her childhood Greek. Angeliki turned down the music.

“What’s going on in here?”

“They told me to get funky,” Charlie said gravely.

“We did not!”

“They did. They said: ‘Father, we would like you to shake your moneymaker.’ ”

“We didn’t!”

“They said: ‘If you don’t shake your moneymaker, we’re going to shave an egg.’ ”

“Daaaaaad! We didn’t! Dad started it!”

Afterward, Charlie and Angeliki got the kids ready for bed. This was a major production, partly because Charlie had riled them up: Jasper wouldn’t stop moving, stripping out of his pajamas as soon as Charlie managed to get them on and running around the house, penis-proud. You forgot sometimes that every bit of fun was like lighting a fuse. Eventually Charlie had to yell at him, to threaten not to read to him before lights-out—though probably this would bum Charlie out more than it would Jasper—and the boy calmed down enough to join him in the old spindle bed where Charlie and Angeliki slept. The Trumpet of the Swan. Téa climbed into bed too, so that Charlie had a child on either side of him, like cubs, some deep animal thing done for warmth. He’d loved The Trumpet of the Swan as a boy, particularly the part where Louis gets rich playing in a band, but it wasn’t the sentences that moved him now but the fact that he was saying them to his children, the same sentences his father had said to him. In fact, he was hardly aware of the sentences at all. He worked hard all day and sometimes all night, lucky to get five hours of sleep in a row, pumping people with potassium so their hearts could be revived or fixed or even replaced, anything to grant them a bit more time on earth, except it wasn’t merely for these people that he worked so hard: it was for Téa and Jasper. He wanted to shelter them from loss and heartbreak. Not from the fact that these things existed—he’d devoted his life, for better or worse, to staring them down—but from the idea that they were anything to fear. That he, a cardiac anesthesiologist, feared them himself. Except he couldn’t tell his children this. He couldn’t tell them that his job as their father was to make them as unafraid as he could, for as long as humanly possible, because god knows he was afraid for them, sick with fear really, it was what kept him up in the middle of the night even in his exhaustion: how they would grow up soon and get into cars driven by shitfaced boys or dive into swimming pools from strangers’ roofs or maybe even have a bad LSD trip, a truly life-scarring terror bath, and this time in bed together was Charlie’s way of saying that he would be there to protect them, that bad acid trips were just a worse version of what already assailed them on a nightly basis, the creepiness that haunted bathrooms and mirrors and quickly-turned corners, portents that the world wasn’t what it seemed to be, impervious to the “nightmare traps” Jasper built out of stuffed animals and placed around his bed. But what Charlie hoped to say by reading to them was that the world was exactly how it seemed, it had light and meaning and shelter, he would protect them from internet stalkers and active shooters and pervy men in gym shorts. He would trap all their nightmares—not just now, but forever. That’s what his job was: to lie and lie, for as long as they would swallow it.

“Tell us a doctor story!” Jasper and Téa said after he’d finished reading to them. Somehow Charlie had begun telling them bedtime stories about famous medical anomalies. How this had begun—or why—Charlie could not remember. Their thirst for them was an act of rebellion, a way of pushing against his campaign of deception.

“Okay. A quick one. Tarrare?”

“Yes! The man who ate the baby!”

“Tarrare, Tarrare, let’s see…,” Charlie said, pretending to have forgotten the story. It was their favorite, though it had been a while since he’d told it; he could never remember which details he’d left in or out. Tararre was an eighteenth-century French man, renowned for being constantly hungry, who could eat a quarter of a cow in a single day. Hyperthyroidism, they think he probably had. He ate so much he drove his parents to ruin. “So he had to become a street performer, eating live cats and puppies.”

“Alive puppies?” Téa said.

Charlie glanced at Angeliki, who was standing in the doorway. “Oops. Maybe I left that out before. On purpose.”

“Was he practicing for the baby?”

“Let him tell it!”

“Thank you, Jasper. They put him in the hospital, to try and cure him, but Tarrare was so hungry he kept drinking the other patients’ blood. Also, sneaking into the morgue to eat dead people. Yes, corpses. Oops, did I leave that out last time too? I’m thinking from your mom’s face maybe I did. Like maybe I’d had fewer glasses of wine when I told this before. Yes, your mother’s nodding at that. Now she’s walking away.”

“What about the baby?” Téa said.

“Finally they kicked Tarrare out of the hospital because a baby disappeared, and they thought he’d eaten it.”

“Yay!”

“Was it alive when he ate it?”

“I’m not sure. Great question.”

Afterward, Charlie took Jasper to bed and zipped him up carefully in the down sleeping bag he insisted on using every night. He was such a sweet, tender, sternly philosophical kid after his fuse had run down.

“Dad?”

“What is it?”

Jasper’s eyes fixed on the ceiling, as if there were something of great interest on it. Charlie knew what was coming: a thought experiment of some kind. There was a new one almost every night. Last night he’d wondered what color your blood would be if you suffocated in outer space, since there would be no oxygen to turn it red. He rarely seemed satisfied with Charlie’s answers, and Charlie suspected he was really asking something else, some larger question he hadn’t managed to formulate or perhaps didn’t even know he wanted to ask.

“That baby that Tarrare ate,” Jasper said. “Did his family think he went to heaven?”

“Probably, yes. I’m sure they did.”

“So they thought he’d be like that forever? A baby? ‘Goo goo ga ga—I want milk’?”

“Hmmm,” Charlie said. “I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

Jasper appraised him coldly. There was something in his face Charlie had never seen before. Was it—hard to believe—condescension? “He’s not a baby forever,” Jasper said softly, “because heaven is a crock.”

Charlie, startled, sat on the edge of the bed. “Who told you that heaven is a crock?”

“That girl last summer. In Montana.”

“Lana?”

“I didn’t know if it was true or not till just now. When I saw your phase.”

Charlie frowned. The boy must be exhausted. And yet he was sure his son had said “phase”—not “face.” He touched Jasper’s hair, stiff as straw with the day’s sweat. “No one really knows if it’s a crock, bud, or what happens when you die.”

He was worried that Jasper would ask him what he believed happened, but the boy didn’t. Charlie told his son he loved him, and his son said “I love you, Dad” back in a way that seemed like the refinement of something sloppy and oblique, a paraphrase of what they’d been saying to each other all evening. There was no feeling like it, really. So why did Charlie sometimes get the impression, once the kids were in bed, that his real day was just beginning? Despite the wine he’d drunk at dinner, he poured himself a scotch and went back outside while Angeliki sent emails and sat on the deck overlooking the reservoir a few blocks away, which looked like the implausible desert puddle it was. He sipped the scotch and listened to the sound of his own brain, a luxury these days. He felt so pure and silent, so much like himself at last—so far from the man who’d been dancing like a robot in the kitchen—that he wondered if he really even wanted to be a father at all. It terrified him, how easily he could come unmoored from his kids, as if one’s deepest connections in life meant nothing. Why had he devoted so much energy to them? Was it all a tragic misunderstanding? In med school he’d dreamed of being a great doctor, an important one even, someone who might revolutionize the way we think about pain itself. Dreamed of finding an antagonist for the CB1 receptor in the brain, something that could block pain in a way that made opioids, and their addictiveness, obsolete. But greatness was cruelty, it was passion, it was Self at the expense of everything else. Sometimes he wanted to freeze his own heart and go about the world like that, to see what would happen. What great things he might do. What if this life he’d built, this life of “times”—tummy time and screen time and family time, quiet time and Medieval Times—was just a sentimental trap?

Cece had done this to him: made him wonder if the world, if everything he cared about, was a trick. He had been good, he had loved her with the purest of hearts, and look what had happened. He’d lost her anyway. When she’d first told him what she’d done, that she was wasn’t coming back to LA, Charlie had gone berserk. He’d cried and begged and made some shameful threats about killing himself, trying to blackmail her with guilt. Later, he’d dreamed of flying back to Montana and grabbing his grandfather’s old shotgun from the cellar and hunting Cece and Garrett down first, killing them in cold blood. For a week or so, he’d played the fantasy out in his head. Surprising them in Garrett’s bed, the shock and terror and pleading for forgiveness. Brains painted all over the walls. Then he’d shoot himself, of course. One of those revenge killings/suicides you read about on the news. He had never imagined anything like this before in his life, never even imagined himself capable of imagining it. When he caught himself researching plane tickets to Kalispell, hunched over his computer at three a.m., Charlie came to his senses and found someone to cover his shift the next day and prescribed himself a Triple-A Ball (Ambien, Ativan, Ardbeg), trusting he would emerge from his hibernation as a human being again.

Of course, he would never kill anyone. Not in a million years. But killing himself was another issue. This was the durable fantasy, the one he couldn’t get out of his head after what had happened. Putting the gun in his mouth, fingering the trigger. The taste of metal and mildew. Charlie would lie in bed and think about it, caressing every detail in his mind, the way a violinist might think through the notes of a cadenza. It was all new to him, this longing for oblivion. Even as a teenager, he’d never had the remotest urge to kill himself. Life had seemed to him like one of those long summer days at the pool where you don’t ever want to get out, you want to stay and swim forever, but then feel so exhausted by the end of it that you climb out, half-willingly, and hobble home. When Garrett had dropped out of college, Charlie had sympathized with him without really understanding it. He’d grieved terribly for Elias, of course—in his weakest moments, had even blamed Garrett for his death—but he’d never felt that life itself was the problem, that Elias’s death was anything but a horrible accident that had deprived him of something precious. Now Charlie began to understand what it was like to see life as unprecious, to feel so crushed and despondent that you didn’t want to leap out of bed in the morning and annoy people by waking them up too. Rise and shine! Why had he ever leapt out of bed to begin with? What did he imagine he might miss? He started smoking again, for the first time since college, buying Viceroys in bulk at Sam’s Club and enjoying them (for lack of a better word) in the tobacco den of his room. He’d been a social smoker at Middlebury, but now he understood what cigarettes were designed for. Like death, you did them in bed. They were a kind of dress rehearsal. The sick day from the hospital became a sick week, which became a sick month, which became a leave of absence.

What would he have done without his family? His mother, his brothers, even his valetudinarian dad? They’d swooped in and reclaimed him as their own, nursing him back to health, forcing him out of bed since he wouldn’t leap out any longer. Jake had even moved in with him for a bit, forcing Charlie to go to the gym with him and making sure he was eating something besides frozen taquitos. Without Jake, he might have lost his job. He might have become an ex-cardiologist chain-smoker. And he had Jake to thank, too, for eventually introducing him to Angeliki. She’d been hired to renovate the lobby of Jake’s office; Jake had set them up on a blind date. Charlie had fallen in love with her—not instantly, thank god, but slowly, watchfully, over a period of months—and then asked her to marry him. It was a lovely California wedding; no one had become sick; Angeliki had gotten pregnant within six months. The human capacity for survival was amazing. The suffering in Charlie’s past became a kind of crucible, paving the way to his current happiness. Life was a voyage, and heartbreak filled the sails.

Except that he still thought about Cece. Her face appeared to him while he was driving to work or riding the elevator at Cedars-Sinai or surfing the webpages of his mind while he was drifting off to sleep, as vividly as if he were seeing a photo in his head. A stranglehold of longing and anger would choke him for a second. It was worst in Montana, vacationing at the lake, where she seemed to rise out of every nook and cranny of the house like a ghost. He’d thought inviting Cece and Garrett to the lake last summer would somehow immunize him: it seemed ridiculous to avoid them for the rest of his life, given that they lived ten miles away. The truth was, too, that Charlie missed them. Not just Cece, but Garrett as well. His best friend in life; there had been no replacement. Charlie imagined he was a big enough man, a happy enough man, to invite him back into his life. It had been nine years. They had families of their own, they were fathers.

But then Charlie saw her. She got out of the car, a little heavier in the hips but basically the same way he remembered her, and he knew right away he was lost. He smiled, he fawned over Angeliki and the kids, but it was like waking up from some shrewdly convincing dream and trying to pretend you were still in it. Seeing her had not been an inoculation at all. It had been an infection.