“My dad had a thing with Jews,” Aaron said with a nod. He’d been nodding the whole time Philip talked, rhythmically, like the Hasidic guys praying on the subway. “But my dad was an old country fool.” Aaron smiled. “I say, look at the things we have in common. Brisket? You like brisket?”
“I do.”
“See? You’re an honorary Texan.”
“Maybe you’re an honorary Jew,” Philip quipped.
“What makes you one? Not your mom, I mean, like deep down?”
Philip opened his mouth and paused. It was a harder question than he thought. He shrugged. “Circumcision? Guilt?”
Aaron considered this. “One of those.”
Philip thought of Julian’s cock, the first time he held an uncut one his sophomore year, and wondered if he came off as more neurotic than he imagined.
“Is Julian?” Aaron asked. “Jewish now?”
“No. We—It never came up.”
“But you’re married? You guys got married?”
“Yes. Three years ago, in Massachusetts.”
The buzzer went off. Aaron started up from the radiator cage.
“Pizza,” Philip said, heading to the foyer. “Are you hungry?” Aaron responded with an indeterminate grunt. Food would tide them over until Jay got home, Philip thought as he paid the delivery guy, and in the meantime maybe Aaron would loosen up and talk about his son’s childhood. Shed some light on the world behind that Texas twang—the one Philip was crazy about when they first met, and had by this point slipped out of Jay’s speech except when he was drunk or angry. He plated two slices and returned to the living room.
“I should head out,” Aaron said, setting his beer on the windowsill.
“Before Jay? He works downtown. Out of the tunnel it’s ten minutes. He’ll be here any second.” Philip checked his phone. Five new texts from Gerald, none from Jay.
“Well, I’ve got a flight to catch.”
“Today?” Philip said. “When did you get in?”
“This morning.” Aaron stood up. “It’s a red-eye home, but I figured I’d give myself time to get to the airport, not knowing New York from Adam and—”
“Why did you come here?” Philip asked. “Why did you come?”
“I wanted to see—Julian’s life.”
“But not him?” Philip stood in the entrance and crossed his arms. “Why come all this way without telling us, for a few hours? After staying away so long. Why stay away?”
“That’s an old can of worms. Expired.” Philip stared at him, waiting. Aaron chuckled to himself. “Would you want me?” Aaron asked, clasping his hands tightly. “As your dad?”
“I—have a father, who is by no means perfect, because no one is. But if I didn’t have him I would want a father.”
“I don’t bring good where I go.”
“But here you are,” Philip said.
Aaron stared at his hands. “When I was serving.” He looked up at Philip. “Was your dad in-country? Vietnam?”
“No.” Gerald failed a vision test, or that was the story. Thirty years later he got Lasik, covered on the Goldman health plan, and overnight was twenty-twenty. “No,” Philip stammered, “he had a—medical deferment.”
“Well. Whatever happens with these Democrats, McCain’s got my vote. Real patriot. The day my company was killed over there—I was younger than you are now—I lay at the side of the road, hips and legs broken on the roots of a tree. And the tree said, No one is coming, You’ll die here alone, You will die. I’ve always known. We know.” Aaron unclasped his hands and let his right arm float up like he was doing a magic trick. It trembled and started jittering wildly. “I got Parkinson’s,” he said. “The shakes. Agent Orange they think, probably. Sometimes it’s genetic. I figured Jules should know.” He put his arm down and clasped his hands again.
“Mr. Warner, Aaron, I’m sorry. Is there, are you doing treatment now?”
“I take my combo. I get worse if I don’t. The doctors say I won’t get better. But I got my friends at the VA. They pitched in and bought me my ticket here, and drove me to the airport so I didn’t—Cabs in Houston aren’t like here. Real expensive.”
“Are you not allowed to drive anymore?” Philip asked.
“Oh no, I can drive. They adjusted my benefits last year, Social Security or disability whatever, and my monthly—it wasn’t enough for the car payments anymore, so the dealership came and took it.”
Philip had been to Houston twice, and Jay assured him no one but the seriously poor took the buses. “How do you get around? Like for food or doctors?”
“There’s a convenience store on the feeder road by my place,” Aaron said. “And my buddies pick me up to go to the VA.”
The image of Aaron shuffling down the highway for a TV dinner was too much for him. Philip swigged his beer. A passage from his mitzvah speech floated to mind—the parsing of chesed versus tzedakah. And here it was. Not in the abstract, a real opportunity to show loving-kindness toward Jay’s dad. Expressed through money, yes, but capable of improving his life in a time of need. “How much do you owe on it?” he asked. “The car. To get it back?”
“Nice seeing you again, Philip. I should go.”
“Hang on.” Philip hurried to the foyer and grabbed his checkbook from his Jack Spade attaché. “Don’t be offended,” he called, returning to the living room. “It can’t be that much if it’s a few months, and it’s the least we could do to—”
“That’s not why I came.” Aaron shoved his hands in his pockets and stood up. The front door opened. They both turned to the foyer. Jay entered in his daily nonprofit uniform—fitted khakis, untucked button-up, red Converse high-tops—a million boyish miles from the profile he cut in the Ted Baker suits Philip made him buy for trial. He looked lean and handsome, always sexy to Philip when he was this focused, even if the focus lately meant Jay had no libido and just rolled over like a doll and let Philip fuck him.
“Hey,” Julian said to Philip, and turned to Aaron. “Dad. Unexpected, as always.”
“Hi, Jules,” Aaron said.
“What are you doing here? Wait.” Julian looked Philip over. “Why do you have your checkbook? Did he ask you for money?”
“No,” Philip said.
“You’re giving him money?”
“He didn’t ask. He’s sick. He has Parkinson’s. He came to tell you.”
“I came to say—” Aaron stepped toward Jay but stopped, like he wasn’t sure what he came to say. “I came to see you.”
“OK.” Jay shut his eyes. “Maybe you’re sick, or dying, or broke, I don’t know—”
“Jay?” Philip interjected.
“But I’ve done a lot of work on myself. I promised my therapist that if this day ever came, I’d share some things with you.” His eyes reddened. “Your disappearance when I was thirteen was harmful to me. Your lack of any contact for years, when I knew you were out there somewhere, was worse than if you were dead. Then you show up. At Mom’s memorial. Now. There are ways to have a relationship. We can try to have contact, with boundaries. But this, out of the blue, I do not accept. You need to go.”
“Julian,” Philip whispered.
Jay shot him a primal, with-me-or-against-me look and turned back to Aaron. “I have to protect myself and what I’ve created. You need to go now, Dad.”
“I never got in your way, did I?” Aaron said. His head bobbed. “All the things different about you growing up, the things you wanted to do, but it seemed like you knew what you were doing, so who was I to—I didn’t get in your way.”
“And that makes you what?” Jay asked. “A parent? Please go.”
Aaron dropped his head. He loped around the perimeter of the room, avoiding them. “Goodbye,” he muttered as he passed Philip. He went out the front door.
Jay stood fixed to the spot where he’d made his speech. Philip came over and hugged him. Jay kept his arms at his sides. “I’ve got to get back to work,” he said.
“What?” Philip
said. “No, take the rest of the day off.”
“I’m going to lie down a minute, before I head back.”
“Jay, they’ll survive without you for one day.”
“But my life doesn’t change,” Jay snapped. “It doesn’t change because my dad decided to blow through it. So put away your checkbook and stop talking about things you know nothing about.” He left. Philip heard him tread down the hall and shut their bedroom door.
Philip’s phone vibrated at a string of new texts. His mom had entered the fray:
Where are you?
We’re calling the police
if you don’t call now.
Right now
He got another beer and lay on the couch. As his finger hovered over Gerald’s missed calls, an image of his dad came to mind. At breakfast, when he was a kid. His dad would discourse on the headlines in the Journal as he peeled a hard-boiled egg, getting under the membrane with delicate breaks and nudges until the whole shell came off in one piece. He salted it, and then after minutes of calm talk and focus, Gerald would devour the egg in two bites.
“Philip!” His dad picked up at the first ring. His voice was warm and nervous.
“You can call off the National Guard.”
“We were worried about you. You weren’t answering your phone.”
“We had our hands full,” Philip said. “Jay’s dad was here.”
“From Texas? Here in New York?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I got a call from Samir Desai, the head of Global Fixed Income at Morgan. He said you quit this morning? No notice or anything?”
“Yeah,” Philip said, “and I flipped a table on my way out.” Regressing, he could hear himself regressing and it pissed him off.
“Samir’s an old friend. Whatever it is, I’m sure we can fix it.”
“No, Dad?” His whole career he never asked Gerald for help—avoided Goldman after college, was the first in the office and last out at night—but he didn’t fall far from the tree so he never really needed to. He kicked the couch at his stupid illusions. “There’s no fix. Ever since I got promoted and moved over to—I can’t do it anymore.”
“But what happened?” his dad demanded.
“An email. My group was laughing at how bad our deals are. For nine months I’ve been running around spraying perfume in a sewer, shouting, ‘It’s all gonna blow!’ Nobody cares. You and Mom taught me to do the right thing, tikkun olam, but we’re the problem! These bad loans keep happening because our banks keep buying them. Do you have any idea how bad it is?”
“Sure,” Gerald said. “Sure, there’ll be a correction.”
Something in his dad’s tone, the slight pause, set Philip’s hair on end. And it occurred to him for the first time what his dad might have done. Gerald, always two steps ahead of the pack. “Dad,” he asked, “are you shorting our deals?”
“Me?” He laughed. “Am I personally shorting your deals?”
“Is Goldman short RMBS? Are you betting this all goes to shit?”
“That’s proprietary,” Gerald snapped. “You know I couldn’t say if we—and even if we were, we wouldn’t be the only ones. With synthetic swaps”—his voice arced high—“there’s an opportunity. A market for everything. You didn’t hear it from me.”
Philip wished he hadn’t. He thought of the overblown things his sister used to say about their dad and his greed, and how she never came home anymore. He thought of the great things he imagined his father built, and the money Gerald bundled for Obama. It was confusing. “You bet against the country,” Philip said. “For what? More money?”
“Phil.”
“I gotta go.”
“Hold on a minute!” Gerald cried. “This is complex stuff. You know how sophisticated these deals are. It’s not a black-and-white—” His dad stopped talking. The phone went silent, muffled as though it was covered. When his dad spoke again it was slower, softer and mucosal. “Do what you want. Do something else. I didn’t work this hard to have my kids feel stuck. I was good at one thing. Numbers. I got paid. But people like you. You help them see inside. You’re strong like that, like your mom. It’s special, Phil.”
“Dad. I’m gonna go.”
“Wait. Should we come over? Your mom and I can—”
“If I neglect this buzz any longer I can’t get drunk. Hanging up now.” Philip dropped his phone and stared at the ceiling. The apartment was quiet. He couldn’t hear Jay in the bedroom, wrapped in his own misery. An agitating sadness swept over Philip. His head spun, less from the beer and more from the feeling that everything he knew—top and bottom, profit, loss, fathers and sons—seemed scrambled.
* * *
They were watching Rachel Maddow when the call came. The guests on TV chattered about Obama bailing out the banks, and what “too big to fail” meant, when a 713 number came up on Jay’s phone. Philip watched the color drain from Jay’s face as he gave short responses—“Yes.… Where?… Thanks.”
He hung up. “My dad died,” he mumbled. “It was the VA in Houston. He fell at home. He had Parkinson’s, and his balance was bad and—” Jay wrapped his arms around himself and started to cry, silently, as tight as a turtle pulled into its shell.
The next day they flew down. Jay put on headphones and slept the whole time. Philip ate peanuts and replayed the day Aaron showed up at their place last summer. They never really talked about it. Not about the rude way Jay spoke to him after Aaron left, or about a question that still lingered with Philip: if he hadn’t quit his job that day and come home early, would they have seen Aaron or known he was sick? He never put it into words because he knew it was that very thing, the not knowing, that had grown familiar but never safe for Jay. For months, Philip held the memory of Aaron’s visit on his own. It seeped into him—Aaron’s urge to see and connect that day—and placed him, he guessed, in a line of women going back to Jay’s mom, who thought they might fix Aaron. He figured all the questions had been asked before: which were the preventable or inevitable disasters in the arc of a life. But Aaron’s life was the first one Philip had ever seen close to playing itself out. And it haunted him.
Things had resettled after Aaron’s visit. Jay handily won his trial, spanking the Bush administration. The LA Times did a story with a court exit photo of Jay and his clients, and a lofty quote from Jay about America treating immigrants like members of our human family. Philip meanwhile binged on reality shows, bought a guitar, and lived the unemployed life, until one morning he rolled over in bed and said he wanted more. “You should start your own thing,” Jay said. “People like you.” Philip heard echoes of Gerald, the day he quit, and wondered if what his dad said was right. Did he have a fundamental desire to heal, to listen and help, that he shouldn’t ignore? He leaned into thoughts of Aaron, and in a week he had a modest concept sketched out: a nonprofit offering financial literacy to veterans. Jay was supportive with his time, and an idea evolved into a business plan. It was how Jay showed love, more action than words. Philip used his last bonus from the bank as seed money. For the first time he expressly asked his dad for help, to tap folks for the board, and he’d just had a meeting about a pilot at the VA in Manhattan when a caseworker from Houston called with the news about Aaron.
After they touched down at Intercontinental—“Bush Airport now,” Jay said with a wry grin—they didn’t head north to Bonnie’s, where they were staying, and instead drove straight to the VA to catch the caseworker. She was a sweet older woman with gravity-defying hair, who thought Aaron was dapper, always dressed in a suit when he was there. She told them Aaron’s friend found him soon after he died, when he came to pick up Aaron and no one answered. She handed Jay a bag of personal effects and apologized for not calling sooner, but he wasn’t the emergency contact Aaron listed, and she just happened to see a son mentioned in Aaron’s file yesterday. He was cremated, but his friends were planning a thing at Houston National Cemetery, and would they like information about it?
“We’ll
be in touch,” Jay spoke for the first time since they sat down at her desk. He leaned forward. “Philip works with veterans,” he began, and proceeded to pitch his husband—the years of experience in banking, the need for financial planning in veteran communities, the importance of agency partners. These are the words Jay has right now, Philip thought, his way of getting through. So he smiled and gave the woman his new business card.
Back in the car, Jay looked straight ahead as they drove to Aaron’s apartment in a seedy commercial section of northwest Houston. The whole way there was the same ugly sprawl to Philip, but Jay seemed to know where they were going. They pulled off at an exit. “There,” Jay said, pointing to a faded apartment complex on the feeder road. Philip saw a 7-Eleven where Aaron might have bought groceries. The caseworker had called ahead, and the property manager met them in the parking lot by the first-floor unit. He was a grizzled older dude, with tattoos on his forearms that Jay couldn’t stop staring at.
“Warner?” he asked. He shook Jay’s hand. “Sorry for your loss. Good man, Aaron. Funny as hell. Rent always on time. I got some boxes, if you need any.”
“Just trash bags,” Jay replied.
The manager let them into Aaron’s place, a one-bedroom with almost nothing in it. A metal dining set in the kitchen. A wood veneer couch with polyester-wrapped cushions, like something out of a small-town airport. There was an indent in one of the cushions, opposite the little flat-screen TV sitting on stacked plastic crates. Nothing on the walls, Venetian blinds across the slider to the patio. It was sparse and clean. Neither of them spoke. They wandered toward the one door in the open space, to the bedroom, and that was when Philip spotted a patch of red-brown on the bathroom tile. He whirled around in the doorway before Jay could enter.
“Let’s split it up,” Philip said. “I’ll take the bedroom, and you do the common areas?” Jay nodded. “Anything you want to keep? Clothes of his, or…” Jay shook his head and handed Philip a trash bag. He waited until he heard Jay open a cabinet and start pulling out plates before rushing into the bathroom and assessing the damage. It was definitely blood. An irregular patch the size of a mouse pad in front of the sink, maybe a body’s length from the shower, he couldn’t be sure. He wet a handful of toilet paper and scrubbed the tile clean to the clink of silverware in the kitchen.
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