THROUGH THE DOORWAY OF THE SYNAGOGUE LIBRARY that opens onto the main hall, Richard can see his sister Rachel clacking up the temple corridor from the dressing room. She is frantic, looking for things that have not arrived: her bouquet, her mother’s pearls, the groom. She moves in a rustle of taffeta and silk, beneath a pearl-beaded cap and a tent of cream lace, like a perambulating cake on a mission from God. That, at least, is how Richard will put it to Brian when he speaks to him later tonight, long distance. It is not a good simile, Richard is aware of that. It is rather overdone and straining for effect, but that, he thinks, is apposite to the occasion.
This marriage—Rachel’s second—has come after a long and arduous courtship and there is more than a little triumph and enmity in the proceedings, which Richard imagines must resemble the emotions in a calf-roping ring. Richard likes to think of things being like other things. He does not like to think of things being what they are, in themselves. That, at least, is what Brian told him recently. He had not put it quite that way, of course, being Brian, but that is what he meant, Richard thinks, when he said, “You’re always loving what you left.”
What Richard Has Left is a category, Richard reflects, which now could be said to include Brian, the man he loves and lives with and left two days and some two thousand miles ago to come to this wedding alone. Richard had not expected to attend. As a rule he avoids weddings, but when his father announced a few weeks ago that his mistress would be coming, Richard agreed to take part.
He told Brian that he was going for his mother’s sake, to hold her hand. He told himself he needed a vacation from life with Brian. But now that he is back in Minneapolis, back in this town he vowed never to return to, Richard struggles to remember why he has returned, he who has spent a lifetime leaving this place and these people he loves behind.
When he left the Midwest fifteen years ago, first for college then medical school, Richard vowed never to return. With the naive conviction one can nurse only in one’s youth, he believed that he was making a clean break. He imagined his family would fade for him as a lighthouse beam fades when a ship pulls out to sea, diminishing to a weak trail across the air, then vanishing. Their lives seemed small to him then, their choices inspired by fear, not the sharp desire he had discovered and traced over the skin of men, desire like a cord deep in his gut that had strengthened, grown taut, pulled him with a jolt into his body, his life. Now that he’s back in this the city of his earliest sorrows, he finds it difficult to account for his time since he left; it seems to him that no time at all has elapsed since he was home for his sister’s last wedding, since he last saw his family, that he has always been—may always be—in waiting.
From the library where he stands looking out onto the foyer, watching the preparations his sister and mother make, Richard can see that Rachel is more nervous this time than the last. She is anxious to get the details right: She double checks the corsages in their box, she counts them twice; she scrutinizes the commas on the programs, harangues the caterers by cell phone. She makes a show of her guttural “h” when she pronounces chuppah, as if it would prove her an observant Jew, which she is not. He cannot help but notice how careful they are of ritual this time around, superstitious maybe or simply aware now of how fragile such vows are.
When Rachel turns toward Richard with a pleading look, he gives a little flutter of his fingers and smiles at the Divine Pastry and, with a relief he would rather not consider too closely, starts toward her.
Halfway across the foyer, Richard’s mother intercepts him like a bad pass.
“I need to speak with you,” she says, voice low.
Across the foyer, Richard’s father has entered with Uncle Leonard and a relative he does not recognize, a large woman in beige. “Rachel …” Richard begins to say.
“Can wait.” His mother bends her mouth into a smile and turns a radiant look on Rachel and the all-but-empty foyer, as if they were her audience. Then she grips Richard’s arm above the elbow and starts toward the chapel. But she is too late.
“Hey, kids,” Richard’s father shouts, as he crosses the room to them.
His mother stiffens. For as long as Richard can remember, his father has called them kids—his mother, his sister, him—and despite his mother’s protestations, the term has stuck. “Kid,” he can hear her say, as she said throughout his childhood, “is an inappropriate address for a woman, even a beautifully preserved woman, of—.” It’s an old argument, Richard thinks, an old wound. But then they all are. Scar tissue, he often tells Brian, is the materia prima of family.
Richard knows this must be hard for her: Though his parents pretend that nothing has changed; though they have not yet mentioned divorce and Richard’s mother disdains even to speak of the mistress scheduled to appear later today, Richard knows the subject cannot be far from her mind.
When Richard’s father reaches them, he embraces Richard with that excess of enthusiasm he has taken to employing since his son left home, an enthusiasm Richard conceives is meant to compensate for his absence in Richard’s youth and to suggest an intimacy they have notably failed to achieve, a public demonstration of a mannish understanding they plainly lack.
“How are you, son?” he asks. Then, turning to Richard’s mother, “Lydia,” he says, almost shyly. “You look terrific.” He kisses her on the cheek.
Richard’s mother runs her tongue over her coral pink lipstick. Impatiently.
“Excuse us for a moment, won’t you?” She holds Richard’s arm in a vice grip, as if clutching a banister on a precipitous descent.
“Of course,” his father says. “I’m sorry. I’ll catch up with you later, Rich.”
Inside, the chapel is hushed and mahogany. Richard notices the narrow band of indigo blue carpeting with absentminded approbation. His mother sags into the first pew.
“Wouldn’t you know,” she says, “the one time your father is early it’s with her.”
“That’s her?” Richard should have known, of course, but he cannot link the word mistress to the bland, beige woman in the hall.
For a moment they share the sepulchral quiet, then Richard takes a seat beside her.
“My god,” Richard says.
He is appalled less by the fact of a mistress than by the woman herself. Though he’d never tell his mother this, Richard was relieved when he learned of his father’s affair. When his mother phoned to break the news, speaking with the remarkable equanimity she maintains in the face of crises—Your father has a mistress. He’s asked her to the wedding. Please come home—Richard had been torn between outrage at his father, grief for his mother, and relief. Here, at last, was desire he recognized and shared. Growing up he had despaired that his parents asked no more of life than the bland false emotion of respectability and dull suburban comfort, which looked to him like loneliness, a joyless match. Their marriage had made him wonder if the passionate life he hoped for was mistaken, more than we could ask. All they appeared to require was the semblance of happiness, which seemed to him no life at all. But here was proof—painful proof—they’d wanted more. The news confirmed for him a long-held suspicion that things are never what they seem. That none of us is.
But he knows that for his mother the revelation has been a shock, and his heart breaks for her. His mother has believed in the image of things—the right fork, the right wine, Julia Child; she’s believed that abiding rules will redeem us, that being right is—if not the same as being happy—at least compensation for unhappiness, imagining perhaps (as Richard so often had as a child before he fell in love with men) that happiness is beyond them. But seeing his father in the lobby with the woman who absurdly must have been his lover all these years, Richard thinks perhaps it’s not. Perhaps happiness is out there still, waiting for them, in the foyer or the world, like the plump woman in beige.
“How’s Rachel taking it?” Richard asks, trying to shift the subject from mistress to bride.
“She doesn’t know,” his mother says. She picks a bit of fluff off her dress.
“She doesn’t know?”
“I didn’t want to upset her,” she says. “She’s been so tense, so sure that something will go wrong.”
“She’ll be furious, you know,” Richard says, “when she finds out.”
“She won’t find out. Why should she? Your father’s very good at keeping secrets.”
“She’ll have to find out sometime, Mom.”
“Sometime,” she says, “not now.”
The way she says it makes Richard think that his mother is the one who’d rather not have known this, known sometime, but not now. He takes her hand in his and holds it. It is cool and dry and seems impossibly fragile, and he wonders when her skin grew thin, her veins blue and protruding, vulnerable beneath the surface, a few brown spots here and there.
“I’m not sure I’m going to be able to make it through this,” she says softly.
Richard strokes her knuckles gently. “Of course you will,” he says.
“Nothing is a matter of course anymore,” she says.
Someone opens the chapel door behind them and there is a sudden burst of sound from the foyer—the sound of guests arriving—and then a quiet “Sorry, I didn’t know anyone was in here” and the soft sound of the door closing.
“How long have you known?” Richard asks.
She shrugs. “I’ve known for awhile that your father had ‘friends.’ I didn’t know about her until Rachel announced the engagement. He said he wanted her at the wedding. It’s been six months. I would’ve told you, but your father made me promise not to. He said he wanted to tell you kids himself.” She smiles up at him, as if she might cry. “Now you know.”
She draws a sharp breath as if she might sob, and Richard pats his pockets for a Kleenex, but she doesn’t cry. Instead she tells him what she knows about the mistress, the woman named Betsy with whom his father has been involved for years. She is divorced, a former executive secretary at General Mills, a woman his mother remembers meeting once years ago at a fiftieth birthday party for Richard’s father, which Betsy helped coordinate; Richard’s mother remembers thinking her sweet, if rather bland.
“I just wish I had a little more time,” she says wistfully, and Richard understands that she means more time with her husband, time to make it work between them. He feels suddenly how difficult this must be for her and his throat aches.
“Just an hour,” she says, “that’s all.”
“With Dad?” Richard asks, his voice soft with sympathy.
His mother looks at him with irritation, as if this were an unkind joke. “Without him,” she says. “I want your father out of here. That woman can do what she wants. But I want him out. The liquor store at Byerly’s called to say the champagne order is ready. Do me a favor, will you? Get him to drive you over and load up the coolers? For me? Please.”
“Of course,” Richard says. He stands and walks to the door, then he turns to look back at her, at her tiny fragile figure on the hard wooden pew, as it seems he has always done—turning back to look at her as he is leaving her behind.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” he says, door handle in his hand.
“Don’t pity me,” she says. “Your father’s a prick.”
Richard knows that he should be angry with his father, but what he feels is awkwardness, a slight unsociable embarrassment at all that is unsaid between them. Richard and his father don’t speak as they cross the temple parking lot under the humid blur of a Minnesota midday sun, and Richard hopes that his father won’t try to disburden himself of details, to pass on his secrets to Richard, like family jewels. Richard is curious, it’s true, about his father’s other life, but it is the faint unsatisfying curiosity that one reserves for the tragedies of strangers. He does not really want to know. It’s enough to know that they hold this thing in common: infidelity.
“Some heat we’re having,” his father says, irrelevantly. He clenches his fingers and a faint beep issues from a car in front of them. Richard’s father is a handsome man, the sort of picturesque old gentleman that foreign tourists snap photos of. His father’s favorite story from his travels abroad is the one about the cluster of Japanese tourists who surrounded him once in a street in Paris and took his picture as if he were a national monument, thinking him the quintessential Frenchman in his red beret, his handsome face, his pouty frown. He delights, as Richard does, in being mistaken for someone else. As if a false, even a mistaken identity, might be more promising than the ones they have.
Richard’s father is a great believer in family, in the notion of family, a thing Richard thinks may characterize those who are unfaithful—this faith in family they cannot seem to keep. As they drive up Hennepin, heading for Excelsior Boulevard, Richard remembers a night many years ago when his father drove them through a wooded area near their home. The swatch of park was part of a campaign by the city to preserve the last remaining wild lands in their bedroom community, and as they took a curve by the small swampy lake where Richard had first kissed another man (a boy really, lanky and tough, with white blond hair, who tasted of Marlboros and peppermint schnapps), a shape had bolted into their headlights and they’d felt the thick dull weight of a body clip the grill of the car before it bounced off the bumper and into the grassy ditch.
It was a scrawny deer, legs skinny as fishing poles, a thing that seemed meant by its delicacy to be broken; its side heaved frantically, smudged with mud and blood. Richard had stroked its coarse brown fur, crying stupidly, pointlessly, over what was already lost. His father had clicked his tongue. “Damn it,” he said. “Goddamn it.” Across the road Richard saw a second deer waiting near the trees, watching for this one to clear the road and come, innocent still of loss. For a reason they never discussed, they decided not to tell Richard’s mother. As if it had been some sexual indiscretion, a shameful indulgence, this accidental death. “We don’t have to mention this,” his father had begun. “No,” Richard agreed. And they never had.
But Richard thinks of it now, driving with his father once again. He remembers how his father had looked stern and moved and solemn as they drove home and how he had said, the only mention of it he had ever made, was to say, quietly, distractedly, “I never saw it coming.” Which is how Richard imagines he feels now, about all of this, all of them, even his own life, though he does not say it. It makes Richard feel tender toward his father and he lays a hand on his Dad’s thick shoulder and gives it a light squeeze and his father frowns at him, eyebrows raised, wonderingly, and then smiles and says, “I’m glad you could make it, son.”
By two-thirty, the foyer of Temple Beth Elohim is clotted with guests who arrive in large shiny rented cars, feathered hats, polished shoes, accessorized with leather. Rachel has retired to the dressing room and Richard stands alone by the chapel door, armed with programs, squinting at the blaze of the ozone-depleted summer sun reflected off the asphalt parking lot.
His mother, Mrs. Lydia Klein (née Morris), stands greeting guests as they arrive. She is a formidable woman, even from here, even in the face of adversity. Her authority is apparent and impressive, her casually correct posture, elegant and unrigid; the taut skin of her cheeks glows like polished leather. Tan and toned, she has—he thinks—the resolute bearing of the unhopeful, like a Civil War general leading troops into a losing battle. Her small figure has always seemed towering to him, even after he grew well beyond her five-foot-five height. When she looks up at him, he still feels she is looking down. Even now, especially now, seeing her in a shift of Prussian blue linen, a string of pearls at her neck, the diamond of her wedding ring catching the light so it glints.
It has fallen to Richard to hand out programs. He stands by the chapel door, trying to soothe the gentiles. He slips the folded program with its inset sheet of Hebrew prayers into the hands of his mother’s Methodist kin, knowing there is nothing a Methodist fears more than not being able to comply with the rules. He notices several on his mother’s side freeze when they glimpse the unfamiliar Hebrew letters. The idea of having to sit through a communal prayer without being able to hold up their end clearly unnerves them. His aunt Elizabeth, his mother’s elder sister, looks positively stricken, as if she might turn back, until Richard points out the transliteration on the back. Still, once the ceremony is underway, it will be rough going for the gentiles, the Orthodox contingent spitefully upping the tempo until it is difficult for even the Reconstructionists to keep up.
The last time Rachel married, the groom was an Anglo-Catholic and the wedding was held before the family hearth with a justice of the peace presiding; a string quartet played Bach in the kitchen, and the Methodists—on his mother’s side—were right at home. The Jews—his father’s New York kin—were grim; they came late, left early, wore yarmulkes through the service, though there wasn’t a rabbi for miles. Richard’s mother had orchestrated the whole affair. The reception was held at a good French restaurant and involved large quantities of poached salmon, pâté, endive, baby vegetables. There were ice sculptures in the shapes of fish and swans, loaded down with caviar, hard-boiled eggs, and shrimp. The wedding cake was a monument of scalded sugar, built of profiteroles stuffed with cream. It was all very comme il faut, Richard thinks now. They had joined the New York family for breakfast and dined with the Minneapolitans at night for cocktails, and the divisions, like the scotch his aunt Elizabeth drank by the quart that long weekend, were neat. But this time something has shifted and Richard is uneasy; he feels lost, relieved for little things like the card that will be on the linen tablecloth tonight, to tell him where, if anywhere, in all of this, he belongs.
The Jews arrive like conquering heroes, loud and exuberant, wearing large hats. His Uncle Leonard, his father’s elder brother, sports an Italian silk suit, a handkerchief in his breast pocket, a skimmer; he slaps Richard on the back as he accepts a program and asks after the bride.
Standing in this crowd of unfamiliar relations, Richard feels disoriented without his props: his desk, his white lab coat and surgical blues, his nurses and reception, his apartment overstuffed with books and tasteful costly art; he feels lost without Brian. Though they fight on trips—unflappable Brian annoying in his equanimity while Richard loses his mind—Richard misses him. Brian is a handsome, charming guy and is great at working a crowd. Richard imagines his lover in the foyer and feels a twinge of domestic pride he can rarely feel when they’re together.
Brian and Richard were friends for years before they became involved. They met while doing their residencies at the same hospital in New Haven before ending up at the same hospital on the other coast. In the years before they got involved, they’d lunched together occasionally, been fond if distant friends. Then, two years ago, they’d drifted into their love affair like flotsam washed up on a beach after a particularly nasty storm. Each having survived a bad breakup had turned to the other first for comfort, then for love.
Their first few months as lovers, they had been careful with each other, solicitous and gentle, the way one is with the ill. They bought each other flowers, tied with ribbon and raffia. They tucked little notes under the windshield wipers of one another’s cars, into lab coat pockets, desk drawers, on clipboards among patients’ histories. At home and out with friends, they called each other absurd pet names: sugar bean and pumpkin, honey and cupcake. They made a show of their domestic bliss, as if to prove their exes wrong. Their sex was passionate and urgent. It left Richard weak-kneed, given to fits of the giggles. But at some point he cannot yet discern, it changed between them. Settled.
These days their sex is more like flossing, a prophylactic regime, regular and suburban as lawn care; Brian never wants to fuck in the kitchen or on the edge of the tub or among the file cabinets of Medical Records as they once did. He does not like to use words like fuck when talking about sex. Richard’s handsome lanky lover wants Doris Day sex. That, in fact, is what they call it, the Doris Day. Is Doris coming today? they quip. Y’know she comes whenever she can. Richard finds he misses his last lover, a small ugly pug of a man who fucked with a kind of Genet-like brutality. When he dreams of desire, as lately he often does, it is this man—not Brian—who holds him, this man whose force, like gravity, draws him magnificently down.
Across the foyer, in the far corner, by a potted palm, Richard’s father is looking uneasy; every so often he turns to scan the crowd, as Richard was doing before catching sight of him. Beside his father is the woman in beige, who appears to be studiously avoiding scanning anything at all. She smiles vapidly up into the rafters, with what seems to Richard to be a vegetable placidity, staring not at the high second-story ceiling, not at the crowd, but at some indeterminate place in between.
What appalls Richard about his father’s mistress is not what he’d expect. It is the fact that she is ordinary. The word mistress hangs about her like a tacky boa, an ill-fitting dress. She is short, plump, dressed in a tan suit and skirt with a pearly synthetic cable-knit sweater underneath. Shaped like a butternut squash. Beside her, Richard’s mother is a monstrous beauty and Richard thinks that this may be the point. The mistress is no threat. She looks intelligent but not too. Attractive but not too.
His father sees him and gives a wave and they start over.
Richard’s father looks misty-eyed, and Richard wonders if he’s regretting having brought her.
“Son, I’d like you to meet Betsy.”
Betsy takes Richard’s hand in both of hers as if to demonstrate her sincerity. “It’s awfully nice to meet you, Richard. Your father has talked about you for—well, all the time. You’ve made him very proud.”
Her hands are soft and powdered. Her hair is salon sculpted, a dull false brown. He is sure she has white couches in her house—worse, a condo—with large floral patterned curtains and glass tabletops.
“And you have made him …” Richard begins, when he is interrupted by someone tugging on his arm. He has no idea what he might have said, how that sentence would have ended. He was in a freefall of verbiage, waiting to hit ground to see what sort of sound, or mess, he’d make. But he never lands.
It’s Sasha, his childhood chum, at his arm. Tugging playfully, as in the old days, when they were kids, and later, in high school, sweethearts.
“We’ll see you later, son,” Richard’s father says, obviously avoiding introductions where he can.
Richard hands a program to a Methodist wavering in the doorway, then turns to Sasha.
“You look wonderful, Richard,” she says. “Running away from home agrees with you. I, on the other hand, am a mess. I gained sixty pounds with Lizzie. I never lost the weight and now.” She shrugs.
Whenever Richard meets his high school friends, people he pretended to know because friends were necessary as clothes—they made it less embarrassing to go out in public—he feels a twinge of self-consciousness, an embarrassed moment when he finds himself wondering what they know about his life now. It’s not that he’s ashamed about the fact that he is gay, quite to the contrary, he imagines rather fatuously that this preference marks him out, makes him part of a lineage of Baldwin and Wilde, Shakespeare and Socrates, confirms some long-held but vaguely and never quite articulated sense that he is different from the others, born for some remarkable end, which he is only now beginning to suspect he is not.
In the psychology textbooks he had read during his medical training, he recognized this as a Napoleonic Complex, but nevertheless, the feeling has remained, haunting him, especially now when the first blush of youth has passed and his life is rutted with the emotional potholes that soon become one’s path in life, and he can no longer imagine himself as anything other than what he is now—a respectable gay radiologist with a handsome husband, a thirty-year mortgage, and a stable, loving, monogamous relationship from which he sometimes strays.
It is not embarrassment then, but something more like shyness that he feels at the prospect that once again, as throughout his schooling, people might imagine that they know him, and are wrong. It’s not as if he isn’t out to his family, they have absorbed the news like leukocytes massing on a foreign body, surrounding it and making it their own. They have produced from the bourgeois surplus of their lives an excess of enthusiasm for Brian. Holiday cards come addressed to them both, as do invitations to Thanksgiving, a set of knives, his and his bath towels, flannel sheets printed with cartoon barnyard animals.
Richard smiles at Sasha and wonders what she’s heard and from whom and in what form. He recalls that she was once very close to his mother. He had been envious of her then.
“How’s Brian?” she asks, answering his unasked question.
“He couldn’t come,” Richard says, though that is not what she’s asked.
She nods. Scans the crowd. Her profile is still flawless, Mediterranean.
“I didn’t invite David,” she says, referring to the husband he’s never met. “Not that he would’ve come.”
Richard feels something in him unknot beneath his rib cage and a warmth take residence there. He’d forgotten how likable Sasha was. Her frankness. Of course he realizes that she may simply be one-upping him with honesty, sensing in her uncanny way his own dissembling, and to counter that impression and deny her the opportunity for superior candor, he adds, “Brian had a gastrointestinal conference to attend in San Diego.”
“Ah,” says Sasha.
He wants to ask her if she is disappointed in the way things have turned out, but she would ask him in what way—how what has turned out—and he would not be able to explain.
He thinks about their childhood as green—bands of grass and dense forests of oak and elm and fronds of wild asparagus. He wants to tell Sasha about the tour he made yesterday of their old haunts, the woods where they smoked dope and the railroad tracks that held a glamour for him then that trains still hold, their old neighborhood with its greenways and bike paths and warnings to yield. As a kid, he had tried to be careful, which is what the acres of tidy green, those pristine forests stocked with bunnies and does were intended, he thinks, to convey. The harmlessness of things. They promised what life never could deliver: that if only you stayed in your yard, if only you stayed on the path, you could avoid damage.
The ceremony is mercifully brief; the couple—to his surprise—are untraditional and have dispensed with the chuppah and most Hebrew prayers. The only remnants of religion are the tallitot and yarmulkes worn by the rabbi and groom. Judaism reduced to sartorial inflection. Watching the couple take their vows—his lace-festooned sister and her portly graying groom in a ponytail—Richard feels a dull tug of recognition, as if he were trying to recall something, when he realizes with a start that what he’s recognizing is the disturbing similarity between the groom and his father’s mistress. They are the same shape. Both members, it would seem, of the squash family, and now his.
After the ceremony, dinner is held in the basement of the synagogue—a large, dim, beige room in which have been arranged dozens of round tables with white tablecloths. Rachel’s father-in-law leans back in his chair, twirling the stem of his wine glass on the table so it makes a neat, indented ring on the cloth.
“Be a sports writer,” he tells Richard, evidently confusing him with someone’s nephew, a reporter for the local Tribune. “All the truly great writers started out writing about sports.”
“I’m a physician,” Richard tells him. “I’m Rachel’s brother? I don’t like sports.”
“Boxing,” he says. “Now there’s a sport.”
The immediate family are seated with the bride and groom, except for Richard’s father, who has defied his place card and sits now beside his mistress a table away. He chats to her, Richard notes, as if she were a distant but delightful cousin. A maiden aunt. He is cautious in the extreme. Rachel, who has begun making the rounds of tables, greeting her guests, appears not to notice this change in seating—or perhaps she is just too preoccupied, or too exhausted, to care.
Richard can hear his aunt Elizabeth at the next table ranting about indigestible bean sprouts. The first female aeronautical engineer in the country and a one-time consultant to NASA, she had been Richard’s favorite relative. He loved her for her excesses in this moderate family: drinking too much, chain smoking, she could argue any of them under the table. But now she’s gone half mad and in her familiar righteous tone is declaiming the vice of vegetarianism.
“People think that stuff is good for them,” she raves. “There are more toxins in raw broccoli than in a pack of cigarettes. And peanut butter? You might as well eat plastic.”
There are raucous toasts, then dinner is served.
Neil and Rachel tip their heads together and make a show of love throughout the meal, and Richard recalls the morning when he first met Neil fifteen years ago, just after Rachel left her first husband, just before Richard left for college. Rachel was twenty-three then, a few weeks divorced, and you could see still a band of pale skin where her wedding ring used to be. It was a weekday morning in late spring and Richard remembers a thin blue sky through cold glass windows, a chill in the air. Richard had been helping Rachel settle into her third-floor apartment. (A fact that seems significant now: Everyone he’s ever known who’s divorced and taken an apartment has chosen rooms on a high floor, as if more at home in midair.)
She sat on the blond parquet wood floor, her legs folded to one side, unpacking boxes and chain smoking Dunhills, while Richard put dishes away on the cabinet shelves. It was approaching noon when Neil emerged from Rachel’s bedroom wrapped in a blue velour robe, wearing moosehead slippers with brown felt antlers. He scuffed sorrowfully across the parquet, his fists dug deep into the pockets of his robe, antlers flopping.
“I overslept,” Neil said, looking at the moose. “I have to call work and tell them I’ll be late again.”
“Poor sweetie,” Rachel said.
“You’re not going to send me to the home for the motivationally impaired, are you?” Neil asked.
“Oh, sweetie,” Rachel said, embracing the man she’d later marry, “This is the home for the motivationally impaired.” They’d laughed then and for a moment clung to one another amid the litter of boxes and their image became indissolubly linked with Richard’s worst suspicions about his family. Months later, when he packed up for college and left, it was this that he believed he was escaping, leaving behind him forever: doubt and its attendant compromises that pass for love.
That is what Brian has failed to understand these last two years; Brian has taken personally Richard’s reluctance to domesticate. He doesn’t understand that what Richard is trying to leave behind isn’t Brian but the thing his mother and sister settled for. He’s spent his whole life trying to get free of these same bonds, to resist the gravitational force of family that demands such compromises, that makes insouciant sex into infidelity, homosexuality into a family embarrassment, all the compromises and scars that come of belonging and wanting to belong. Brian takes it personally, but he’s wrong to do so. Richard simply wants a bigger life than this, than what he sees around him here in the basement ballroom of Temple Beth Elohim.
Across the table, Rachel rises from her chair taking her new husband by the hand. Turning to the klezmer band set up behind her on a platform decorated with crêpe paper and balloons, Rachel blows a kiss to the band leader, a skinny saxophonist who winks at her and blows a deep note, and the band begins to play the Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun” in a slightly dissonant, minor key, klezmer-style, played as it might have been sung in a Polish synagogue a century ago—like a hopeless prayer; and turning to her new husband, Rachel begins to dance.
Richard is not sure how long he watches them, the couples twirling around the room like the carnival rides he watched as a kid, thinking the motion beautiful—synchronized and bright like small bouquets—and wanting to be part of it. But he holds back now as he did then, knowing rides are disappointing once you’re on, the dipping and spinning as if the world has come unmoored, knowing that the dancing couples are beautiful only because he is on the outside looking on at the fine patterns they make.
Instead, Richard gets up from the table and crosses to the bar in the corner. The bartender, in his little red vest and black bowtie, behind his little portable bar, looks bored and for a moment Richard is annoyed that he should see this affair as just another gig, another schmaltzy wedding with a lot of boozy guests, instead of Richard’s family.
The bartender asks what Richard will have and then, before he turns to get it, he holds Richard’s gaze a beat too long, a fraction of a second, but it’s enough. Richard smiles. The guy is not unattractive. Maybe a little young, twenty-six, twenty-eight. As a rule, Richard prefers his lovers to be older; he prefers to be the younger man. The ingenue. But it will do. Besides, it’s just flirtation.
“Always the groomsman, never the groom,” the bartender says, with half a smile.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Richard says. He stuffs a bill into the tip glass, thanks him for the drink.
The bartender sets the bottle of Jim Beam on the bar between them. “Take it,” he says. “It’s got your name on it.”
“Which would be Richard,” Richard says.
“Nice to meet you, Richard. I’m Ed.”
Richard thanks Ed again and goes to sit down at an empty table. He eases off his shoes and pours himself a drink. Then another. And another, enjoying the soft feeling that comes after several drinks when the walls bend like wax, the room slowly collapsing onto itself.
Every so often, as he looks around the room, he glances over at the bartender, who is almost always looking back at him. Their eyes meet this way several times until Richard realizes he’s been staring, and the bartender staring back, for something approaching half a minute, each waiting for the other to turn away. He tells himself it’s not sex he’s after here, but the familiarity of the gesture, the connection made between strangers that defines his other life, which is composed largely of this bravado and self-invention—like the routine he learned as a resident for taking case histories—“playing doctor,” he still calls it.
He’s had to learn this, over time. It is, he thinks, a trick picked up in medical school, where it was necessary not to think about the cadaver disemboweled before you as a person who once played golf, played bridge, ate tuna sandwiches, made love just like you. He’d understood then that sometimes it was necessary to turn things into other things in order to go on. And it worked in the world as well. It helped, he found, to imagine himself the hero of some great adventure, his couplings and courtships prelude to some great love affair, to imagine the future as a place in which fulfillment was imminent.
He’s skilled at impersonation, and knows it. But it has its drawbacks: it makes him wonder what, if anything, is authentic between people. Looking around the room at all these people related to him by blood and genes, he cannot help but wonder what if anything they have in common. On the plane, he’d read in JAMA about the latest studies on twins, and had thought then, looking at the evidence, how fragile and unpredictable are the things that bind us to each other, how irrelevant often and absurd. Lawn furniture and neighborhoods, stamp collections and a preference for parting one’s hair on the side. What struck him about the studies was what was rarely noted in popular press renderings of the research: how inconsequential are the bonds between people in the end, how tenuous and insignificant, even for those more genetically alike than most of us will ever be, how—for all the genetic dicta—we share so little of significance.
When Richard decides to go over and speak to the bartender, it’s not with any conscious intention of picking him up. It’s not premeditated, he tells himself. He’s just playing a part. It’s just one of many things he will pretend away, make into something else: an excess of joie de vivre, a drunken and fantastic absurdity, rather than infidelity. Truth is, he loves Brian, but infidelity has nothing to do with love, he thinks. It’s more like stepping out for a smoke, an invigorating break.
As he passes the head table, Richard overhears his aunt Elizabeth telling his mother about dark matter in the universe—the powerful, unseen substance that gives galaxies their shape, that mysterious force that holds stars and planets in their orbits with its fierce gravitational pull.
Later, as Richard stands in the dewy grass outside the temple’s classrooms where as a child he’d learned the Hebrew alphabet, unzipping the bartender’s pants, he thinks of Brian with sudden and intense longing, the thought arriving as a weight on his heart, but to his surprise it is not unpleasant but a thrilling anticipation that merges in his mind with his arousal and the soft yellow blur of streetlights in the distance, the firm satisfying rump in his hands.
Back inside, in a corridor of the basement, Richard phones Brian, but there is no answer. Richard’s own voice asks him if he’d like to leave a message after the beep. He hangs up. Plans to call back later.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” Sasha says, when Richard returns to the ballroom. She’s standing just inside the door and tugs at his sleeve. “Dance with me.”
“Why not?” he smiles.
They step onto the floor. Moving among the others, awkwardly. People bump against them giddily, drunk, light as balloons. Across the room, his mother is seated at the table, nursing a bottle of Vermouth, talking to the other mother, Neil’s. The two of them sit alone amid a clutter of dirty dishes, while the others dance. Generals holding their ground. They are always sitting there, it seems to him, the mothers. He’s been afraid all these years of getting trapped the way his mother had, the way all the mothers had, her grief a weight he carried with him everywhere, a small but ubiquitous burden, like the nutritious lunches she packed that smelled of peanut butter, over-ripe apples, jelly donuts, a sweet cloying smell that he associates with all her losses, all she’s given up for them. All she might have done and didn’t. She who would’ve been a doctor had she not been born a girl. His one clear aim as a boy was to get free and he had. But now he wonders if he really has or will or even wants to.
Dancing with Sasha, his chin leaned against her fragrant hair, Richard feels a sudden tenderness for these people, all of them, for his family moving in circles around the room, the seated moms. It’s like seeing them from a very great distance, like terrain glimpsed from a plane, that he can map for miles in every direction. Watching Rachel nuzzle Neil’s beard as they dance, Richard can see already how her intense love for him—now that they’ve married—will mellow in a year, become worn in, smaller, leaving gaps that Rachel will fill with bridge games, a vegetable garden, the children she is already planning to have, an affair. But it doesn’t matter. They are here now, in each other’s arms, making something lovely that will not last the night.
And, as if his thoughts were an incantation, it begins, the end.
What Richard will remember of the evening after that is a confetti of images, like the colorful piñatas his mother made for him each birthday when he was young, which they slowly tore apart in the course of the day’s festivities, leaving Richard inconsolable beside the eviscerated figure of a papier-mâché donkey, sun, or deer—though he should not have been surprised since it happened every year, the same old loss.
What he’ll remember of the evening after that is this:
How his father, courtly and maybe still in love with his wife, rose from the table where his mistress sat and walked over and asked Richard’s mother to dance. He bowed a little, took Richard’s mother’s hand in his, and pulled her up from her chair. She was flushed with some sort of strong emotion, but she let him draw her into his arms and for the length of a Sinatra song they held each other. Like old times. Then Uncle Leonard cut in on the couple and Richard’s father returned to the table where his mistress sat, dreamily swaying her head to the klezmer version of “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and drunk, incautious, she’d clasped his arm, and from there the details blur.
There was a moment when the music, which had buoyed them, abated, and Rachel shouting into Neil’s face, said loud and clear, “Who is that woman with my dad? Is she one of yours?”
And Richard, dancing nearby, said, in a moment of uncharacteristic candor (no longer wanting to pretend things were other than they are), “That is our father’s mistress.”
Then a general confusion ensued.
Rachel stood beside the table where Richard’s father sat, and screamed, “I can’t believe you’d do this to me,” before running out. Her bouquet dropped to the floor.
At a signal from someone, the band resumed its work and valiantly played on, though only a few diehards danced. Most were getting their coats, when Richard heard her. “A toast,” Richard’s mother screamed into the roiling music, “a toast to Rachel and Neil.” The dancers didn’t seem to hear at first, until, like brushing snow from a windshield, Richard’s mother swept aside a clutter of dishes from the table and stepped onto it. The music stopped then, or rather fractured, like ice falling off a roof—a few pieces crashing, the rest following in a heap, then silence. Richard’s mother loomed above them, the way the bride and groom should have been held aloft on chairs, a kerchief between them like love. But Richard’s mother stood alone, holding her glass of Vermouth aloft; she weaved, unsupported, in stocking feet. Everyone turned to watch as she struggled to remember what it was she needed to tell them, the thing she wanted to remind them of.
Her face folded in confusion as she looked over the crowd, as if she didn’t recognize them, could not place herself, here among strangers. For a moment, she wavered, towering, as if she couldn’t remember why they were gathered here, and maybe at that moment she did not.
“To …” she said, sadly. Richard wanted to help her. He wanted to call out “Neil and Rachel,” he wanted to call out “Love.” But he didn’t want to unsteady her, could not stand to see her fall. So he watched in a dreamlike paralysis as she teetered on the table, saying, over and over, “To. To.”
Till Richard’s father detached himself from his mistress and moved toward his wife, with a certitude and fluidity of motion that made it seem he was inevitably drawn.
“Lydia,” he said gently, “Come down, hon.” His father had never sounded so gentle, except maybe that one night they’d struck the deer.
But seeing her husband approach, Richard’s mother straightened, grew definitive and bold.
“To,” she told them grandly, lifting her glass, “To—”
And then she fell.
It was miraculous that she only broke a wrist and ankle, shattering one kneecap; at her age, a broken hip could be decisive, the first step in a steady decline. But these smaller injuries would prove decisive as well, if in a different way. Or so it will seem later that night, when the mistress is dispatched in a cab with Uncle Leonard, while Richard and his parents are reunited in the ambulance. His father appears to have forgotten the mistress, refuses to leave his wife’s side. In the eerie light of the ambulance, the men crouch together beside the gurney, an EMT checking vital signs, while Richard’s father holds his mother’s hand, tears in his eyes. He leans close and says something quietly, into her ear. Richard can see his mother nod slightly and press his father’s hand, in reply.
Richard has never known his parents to hold hands before, had not imagined what might be between them, till now—when his mother is vulnerable, his father clearly afraid of losing the woman he clearly loves. Richard can see that his father will never leave her, and had never meant to. As he holds onto the gurney rail, bracing himself against the stops and turns, Richard glimpses the simple thing that had been obscure till now—what a lifetime together might mean: someone there beside you when you fall.
It is late even on the West Coast and Richard knows that Brian will be sleepy and grumpy, he knows the rumpled vanilla smell of him, the tone of his annoyance (Brian never likes staying up late, never enjoys the night as Richard does, preferring the clear optimism of morning, which Richard loathes). It’s two hours earlier on the coast and if he calls now, he’ll wake Brian at midnight. But he misses him, and so he calls.
“Hell-o,” says Brian, jauntily, wide awake.
“Brian?” Richard says. Why the hell is he wide awake?
“Richard?”
There is a sound of music in the background, Miles Davis, loud.
“You were expecting someone else?” Richard asks. He means this to sound like a joke, but it doesn’t. “Is someone there with you?”
“No. There is no one here with me,” Brian says, repeating each word carefully.
There is a muffled sound, and Richard knows that Brian has covered the receiver. When it clears, the music’s lower.
“What’s that music?”
“Oh, just the TV.”
Richard thinks he hears someone laugh.
Richard does not hear the rest. He hangs up.
It occurs to him that he’s just worn out from the wedding, that his own infidelity is what haunts him, not Brian’s. He reaches for the phone to call back and apologize (Richard’s always the one to apologize, Brian never does), setting his hand on the receiver, when it rings. Before he reads the number in the caller ID box, he knows it is Brian. It’s two in the fucking morning, who else would be calling but Brian? When the phone rings a second time, it has the insistent anxious ring of someone caught in deception, someone ready with an excuse and an apology. Someone who’s about to leave but is having a hard time saying goodbye. It rings once, rings twice, rings three times. So Richard picks up the phone and depresses the button to disconnect the call, then sets the receiver beside the phone to keep the line engaged, and he prepares to sleep.
His skin feels clammy as he lies in bed; it prickles with the static-electrified feeling of fear. The room cradles, rocking back and forth gently, and Richard feels the lightness of knowing that nothing holds him down now, the sense of having slipped free of gravity. He imagines this is how the astronauts must feel, nostalgic for the pull of something larger than themselves, longing to be drawn into the orbit of a greater force and held there. It is the heart they have to worry about in space, his aunt Elizabeth has told him. In zero gravity, the heart will grow too large and slack. Without the pull of a greater force, it fails us.