by Zadie Smith
“Great,” said the son, but took only the vaguest sip of froth, without any sign of pleasure. Mike left his exactly where it was.
“I mean, look at this kid. The length of his arms! They tried to hustle him into basketball—well, of course they would—but no interest, none whatsoever. He’s his mother’s child. She plays the piano, loves pictures. He’s a musical, visual person.”
The son sighed, pointed a finger at his own temple and pulled the trigger: “Arty.”
“Hey, it’s a great thing! Don’t despise it! Not everybody can like sports. Be a dull world if they did.” Mike batted at the peak of the baseball cap. “What is that, anyway? Late-life conversion?”
“Kim’s.”
“His girl’s Korean,” explained McRae. “And I really couldn’t be happier.”
“Nice,” said Frank.
“Couldn’t be happier. Marie either. We’re so proud for both of them. Kim’s at the art school, too. Art is a wonderful thing. Education—that’s another wonderful thing. It’s a gift. But it’s not free! I’ve put three boys through college now and I’m telling you: it’s not easy. Guys like us, we never got that far, never expected to—but even if we had, who would’ve paid for it? It’s serious money!”
Frank whistled: “And it’s the middle class that’s getting squeezed!”
“Right. But we’re in it together, me and Marie—together but apart—if you see what I mean. Bottom line: we’ve always sacrificed for these children. Only place we ever been as a family is Hawaii. Twice. Never been to Europe. Never been to Ireland. But Michael Junior went to France—all over France, for a whole summer. Joe went to Spain that time. And Tommy—you went somewhere with Father Torday—years ago—”
“Edinborough.”
“Right, Edinborough!” McRae reached out and squeezed his son’s shoulder. “And I feel I went to these places, through my boys. And that’s what I’m talking about. If you love your children you make these sacrifices—they’re not even sacrifices, they’re just what you do. And all of that—it can’t just end because it’s over! We’re a family. Twenty-nine happy years—happiest of my life. Honestly, meeting your mother was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I stand by that, Tom, I really do.”
“Okay, Dad,” murmured Tommy, but looked grateful, a moment later, for the interruption of a sudden stream of cold air through the door, along with two men in blue, from National Grid. “Maybe we should let Frank get on and run his bar.”
“I am truly a blessed man. I tell that to everyone.”
“Born optimist,” Frank confirmed, though in his own mind the correct noun was slightly longer. “Now, can I get you guys anything else? All good? Okay, then.”
As Frank walked away, McRae shunted his stool still closer to his son until their knees touched.
“Wow, is your mom gonna be so pleased to see you. She saw Joe last week but she hasn’t seen MJ since Christmas. Well, just think of me when you’re eating that leg of lamb—I’ll be right under your feet.”
The boy pulled off his baseball cap: “You’re—you’re not eating with us?”
“No, Tom, not tonight. We’ve got to start making this official, haven’t we, at some point? I’ve been the troll under the bridge for . . . well, a year almost. And your mother’s still a beautiful woman; I mean, I still find her beautiful, I still find her sexy—and the fact is she’ll get online soon enough, and then there’ll be a whole lot of billy goats, you know, wanting to come trip-trapping over—”
“Oh, Dad . . .”
“Hey, I’m happy for her! I don’t even want to drink—” he pushed the Guinness aside; it slid disconcertingly along the table, stopping just shy of the edge—“Don’t know why I even ordered that. Tom, I gotta tell you: right now I feel like life is just this precious . . . this very precious—I don’t even know what, I don’t actually have the right word ready for you right now—but I can tell you I feel it’s precious. And I just want to feel everything that there is to feel, good or bad, and I’ve realized that I don’t need . . . Hey—you wanna eat? Food’s good here. Oh, right, right—you’re eating over there, I forgot. That’s good. Come here.”
Tom McRae submitted to a benign headlock. His adult self, his city self—who only this morning had been confidently discussing the genius of Cindy Sherman with the adult children of lawyers and doctors—now shrank and slipped away, to be replaced by an earlier incarnation: the shy, suburban middle son, hiding his eyes behind hair.
“It just feels weird,” he said and took hold of his drink with both hands, lifting it to his lips like a milkshake. “I mean, not that I want you guys to get all dramatic, but—it’s weirdly peaceful, that’s all.”
“Oh, it’s the peace-fullest divorce in history!” cried McRae. “That’s what I was just saying to Frank! Never even hollered at each other in almost thirty years.”
“Right. That’s how I remember it. But Kim—she’s like: no way, dude, must be false memory syndrome. But I was like: no, I remember how it was. But, look, we—we don’t have to talk about any of this.”
“Oh, no, no—Tom, I don’t mind talking about it. I like talking about it. Actually, it’s good for me. I talk about it all the time. I have this rule—and I’m not trying to God-bother you, Tommy, I’ve never done that, you know that—but the fact is, this is how I’m thinking now; I say to myself: would you, Mike McRae, say this that or the other if Jesus Christ himself was at your shoulder? And if I wouldn’t then I don’t. Simple as that.”
McRae reached forward and wiped a foam mustache from his son’s frowning face.
“Me and your mother were having this very beautiful conversation a few weeks back—she’d come downstairs to give me back this Japanese breadknife I gave her to slice some beef she got from that little place on—that’s not important—the point is, we’re having this conversation, very forgiving, very honest, and she says: ‘I wanna travel, I wanna meet new people, I wanna get back to my music, to playing the piano like I used to. Thirty years ago I settled for Mike McRae, and now I’m fifty-six and I don’t want to settle anymore.’ Oof. Right in the solar plexus. Now, Tom, that was a hard thing to hear. It was. But, if that’s how a person feels, that’s how they feel. We got three beautiful boys. I can honestly stand here and say: I haven’t a single regret. Not one. I was lucky to meet her. So lucky.”
“Well, that’s great, Dad,” said Tommy—he could not seem to stop dabbing anxiously at his own philtrum with a napkin—“just as long as you’re—you know, just as long as you’re in a good place, I guess.”
“I’m in a great place.” McRae opened his startling blue eyes about as wide as they’d go. “Let me ask you something: You ever see The Sound of Music?”
“Sure.”
“‘When God closes a door he opens a window.’”
Tommy tried valiantly to smile.
“That’s like a line from that movie. That really kills me! So, what I’m saying is, I got a few things on the burner—I don’t wanna talk about them right now—I know I’m talking your ear off—but suffice to say I think you’re going to approve, Tommy, I really do. I mean, most of it you know already. So today’s Sunday—Monday, Tuesday: I’m working. Fine. Wednesday I’m going to the library—see if I can still at least be a Friend of the Library. Look, I know they can’t put me on the action committee anymore, not in any official way—of course I understand that. But no harm in asking, right?”
“No harm.”
“And Friday—Friday I move out—that’s it. That’s the day.”
“Big week.”
“Big week.”
A buzz came from Mike McRae’s waistband. His son smiled tenderly at the sight of his father retrieving some wire-framed reading glasses from the top pocket of his sports jacket and perusing the tiny screen with as much attentive care as some quaint old kook in a Rockwell painting, reading the baseball scores.
“Only guy I know who still owns a beeper.”
McRae looked up over his half-moons with a wide-open, undimmed enthusiasm that made even his gentlest son fear for him.
“Really? A lot of the guys at work have ’em.”
2
The name on the card was Clark: they were to meet in the ten-minute waiting zone just outside Departures. But Clark was late and the morning frigid. McRae got back in his car, drove around, parked in the lot and walked into Baggage Claim. He checked his beeper, held up his card. All the other guys wore suits, had iPad screens instead of cardboard, and their passengers came sooner: a series of middle-aged executives glued to their devices, handing over their bags and asking fearfully about the weather. But now an elegant lady appeared at the top of an escalator and waved at Mike McRae; a tall lady, slender and dark, with black silky hair and a very red mouth, who looked like she could run a 5K without pausing for breath.
“Clark?”
“Urvashi Clark.”
“Perfect. You got any bags?”
She did, but insisted on carrying them. They made their way through a sideways snow flurry to an elevator and then up to a luxury sedan on the second floor. Everything she wore was black: black-framed glasses, black overcoat and, around her neck, a black fur which she placed beside her on the backseat, where its fine hairs quivered like a nervous animal.
“Looks like we’re going to the university.”
“Please.”
She took out a thin folder, the exact shade of her lipstick, opened it and began shuffling papers around.
“You giving a lecture?”
“A paper,” she said, without lifting her eyes from her folder. “It’s a conference on architecture. I’m an architect.”
He let her be. Drove through the complex of flyovers, entered a shaded tunnel.
“Need light?”
But by the time he’d thought to ask they were emerging out the other side, into light so white, so penetrating, it seemed to erase all distinctions—not least the one dividing the front of the car from the back—and Mike McRae felt he could no longer reasonably pretend he was not in a small, shared space with a beautiful woman in the full glory of the day.
“Architecture. Must be interesting.”
“Hmmm.”
“Gothic architecture, modern architecture. I guess I’m a traditionalist. I like a white picket fence. I like a stained-glass window. Of course, in Boston we got a lot of beautiful old buildings.”
“Certainly have.”
“A lot,” said Mike emphatically, though at that moment they happened to be passing a 7-Eleven encased in a huge gray box. “That what your paper’s about?”
“Mine? No.” She withdrew an iPhone from her back pocket and held it in front of her like a shield, but it gave Mike an opportunity to glimpse her left hand, and this was an aspect of his new life that did not yet come naturally: he had to remind himself each time. Nor was he always sure of the correct interpretation. A single black stone in twisted gold, on the second finger.
“Not annoying you by asking, am I?”
“Not at all,” said Urvashi, meeting the expectant blue eyes in the rearview. “Well, I suppose it’s about . . . well, how certain spaces determine—shape—our lives.”
McRae slapped the steering wheel: “Now, that just rings so true to me. So true! Because, I’m from Charlestown—three generations. And Charlestown shaped me, and my family, absolutely. Absolutely.”
“Ah, how interesting.” She leaned forward. “In what way?”
“Oh, values, principles, beliefs. There’s just a Charlestown way of looking at things, I guess.”
“I see,” she said, sat back and returned to her phone.
“Yeah,” said Mike, a few minutes later, as if no time had passed. “Ten years ago, we moved to Cambridge, for our sins, but really everything important that ever happened to me in my life happened in Charlestown. Met my wife walking through the rain in Charlestown—not on the street, I mean—she lived there. We had a friend in common—I needed a place to stay for the night, and I didn’t want to bother my mother—she had enough on her plate. And I’m between apartments—cos this was when I was twenty-two years old, working as a courier, and somebody’s just stolen my bike—anyway, point is, I have a canvas bag with this great wad of paper in it that I haven’t delivered yet. Five-hundred-page document, a manuscript, important to the guy who wrote it, I’m thinking—and this is before the Internet! So this is the only copy. And I’m trudging through Charlestown looking for Marie’s place; she was rooming with two other girls—and I’m getting soaked! So finally I get there and there she is, with ice skates over her shoulder, on her way out—and she says: ‘Make yourself at home.’ Holding these ice skates, looking back over her shoulder at me. Beautiful then and she’s beautiful now. So I make myself at home. I look at my bag and I’m like: Oh, man, I’m in trouble. I laid out each piece of paper to dry. Five-hundred-some pages laid out on every surface of her apartment, on the doors, on the bed, off the ironing board, everywhere! She came home, didn’t even blink. ‘Make yourself at home.’ Boy, did she ever mean that. I stayed that night, the next night—thirty years we spent together. Of course, we’re separating now.”
“Oh—I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be! Look at me. I’m the luckiest man you’ll ever meet.”
To prove it he lifted a little in his seat until the mirror accepted the full toothy brilliance of his smile.
“Bottom line? This is a transitional period for me. I’m driving a car part-time, as you can see. I got an injury running—then I had this operation. Couldn’t work for a while, couldn’t run.”
“That must be frustrating.”
Urvashi picked up one of the little bottles of water from the drinks holder, took a large swig and, then, a little risk: “I run. Not very far, but I like to do it.”
Mike slapped the steering wheel again: “Knew you did! Knew you were a runner just by looking at you!”
“Oh, I don’t know that I’d call myself a runner exactly. I never get beyond three miles.”
“Question of will,” McRae said, holding up two fingers. “Believe me, I know. I’ve run Ironmans, half marathons, whole marathons . . .”
She gave a little shudder and looked out the window.
“No, I could never do that. I don’t have . . . whatever that is.”
“Nah, everybody has it. You wanna know the secret? You do it for that feeling you get in the last minute. That’s what you’re looking for. Look, our lives are easy, right? We switch a button, the light comes on. Press another button, food gets cooked. But you gotta dig deeper than that when you run—into some deeper part of you. That part exists in everyone. Just a matter of finding it again. All be a lot happier if we did.”
“I’m sure you’re right. I may be too old to start, however.”
“Hey, you’re not as old as me. I’m fifty-seven! Ran my first marathon at forty-two. Ran it when I was fifty-three, fifty-four and fifty-six. Up until this injury. Then they prescribe me OxyContin. Well, of course I get addicted to Percocet. Which leads to heroin. I mean, heroin’s cheaper! Isn’t that crazy? That heroin is cheaper? Well, all of that got me into a lot of situations. A lot of situations. And the scary thing is, I wasn’t even in that much pain. You know? Like maybe I should have just experienced the pain.”
They stopped at a traffic light. He twisted right round in his seat to further discuss the problem of pain, and in the same moment some act of grace made her phone buzz, and buzz again. Mike looked concernedly at the device.
“Could be important. You’d better take that.”
Grateful, she picked up the beloved thing, and with a face that suggested the intense business of work or love, commenced scrolling idly through her junk mail.
“Truth is I lost myself,” murmured Mike McRae, “lost myself c
ompletely.” He stopped sharply to allow a mother and baby to cross the street. “Now, people ask me what I mean by that. Well, let me give you just one example from literally thousands.” He checked the rearview. “I’ll wait till you’re done with that.”
Urvashi placed her phone facedown on the seat.
“So I’m going across the park—in deep snow—to pick my youngest son up from this rapping concert—” He took a short, deep breath and winced: “Ah, this is hard talking.”
“Oh, but you really don’t have to—”
“Very low moment in my life. So, he’s gone to see some kind of a rapper—I’m blanking on his name. Real famous, this guy.”
Urvashi threw out the names she knew, doing her best to describe each man physically. For a while it seemed like she would be doing this for the rest of her life.
“You know what? Now I think about it, I believe this person was a white gentleman.”
And in this far smaller pond, it proved to be the second fish.
“Right! But with my new addict brain all I’m thinking is: I’ll call my guy, get the stuff halfway across the park, then I’ll have time to smoke, then go meet my boy. Perfect! That’s addict logic right there. So that’s what I do. And I’m floating, right? In my mind. But actually I’m lying in three feet of snow, and if this dog hadn’t wandered over and licked my face, I probably would have died out there, of hypothermia or what-have-you. So now at least I’m awake and somehow I make it across this field to the lot where the stadium is. And I see all these kids, and they’re all fired up—like they’re really in life. And my Joe is the same way. Fired up! The look on his face! Now, frankly, I don’t approve of that type of music—isn’t music at all, I don’t believe—but I’m standing there thinking, wait a minute: this is what JC did, right? Got ’em all fired up. My kid’s all fired up—and here I am like a zombie. I’m like the walking dead. Man, that was a low moment.”
“I—I—imagine.”
She looked up finally from her lap; she sensed water running alongside the car, racing to keep up. With her fur she wiped the condensation from the window. Boathouse. Geese. Young men in red, heaving oars, blowing clouds from their mouths.