“I just thought—I don’t know—that if I were around to look after you, it wouldn’t be so bad.”
Paul imagined Julian imitating him again and didn’t dare let on that he meant every word. Even at a murmur, he sounded so ridiculous that he couldn’t have blamed Julian for making fun of him. But he didn’t; his mercy was just as capricious as his cruelty.
“I’m going to miss you, too, you know,” said Julian—resigned, or else indifferent, and Paul didn’t dare try to decide which. “But the sooner we stop fighting it, the better chance we have of getting through it in one piece. It is what it is.”
Paul knew this was the closest he was going to get to an apology.
Over the course of finals week, Julian’s room wrung itself empty. The signal flags ended up in the same trash bag as a year’s worth of worksheets and discarded calendar pages. The bookshelf was disassembled and taken, along with its boxed contents, to a storage unit in the Strip District. When Paul arrived the morning of their last exam, the wardrobe was hanging open, and when they spoke their voices rang from the high white walls. Stripped of everything that had given it the illusion of permanence, the room filled Paul with the muffled, eerie sadness that he associated with Cape May motel rooms and his great-grandmother’s suburban rest home. It was designed to be forgotten and to forget.
He would be staying with Paul for the next two nights, which Paul’s family had allowed without protest. Sunday morning, very early, his grandfather would drive Julian to the airport—had volunteered to do so, with a prompt benevolence that looked a bit too much like eagerness. Paul could tell his family had pinned their hopes on the separation. They intended to keep him occupied with his annual volunteer position at the butterfly garden and a job at his grandfather’s repair garage. The plan, he knew, was that he and Julian would slowly lose interest in each other.
Julian had consoled him in fits and starts, far too wrapped up in his own dread to expend much effort. He gave Paul a book of airmail stamps and the address to his grandfather’s summerhouse in the South of France, but he refused to share his parents’ telephone number; he frequently extracted promises from Paul to write twice a week, but only rarely did he make the same promise in return. The last day of finals, Paul knew better than to expect any reassurance. Julian was full of nervous energy, his voice bright with false cheer. As they sat at either end of his bare mattress, he gestured expansively and talked without pause.
“I haven’t given up on coming back early.” Julian lit a new cigarette with the stub of the last, leaning over the empty wastebasket to catch the ashes. “Once we’re back from France, I’ll be able to commit to house-sitting engagements—that can’t have been the only one in the entire city.”
Paul had never met anyone who employed a house sitter in his life, but he didn’t dare say so. Julian’s overnight bag sat at the outer periphery of his vision; its presence nagged at him even when he looked away.
Their last final was with Strauss. Julian finished early, as always, while Paul’s handwriting compressed and his thoughts ballooned past the boundaries of the mimeographed page. He saw Julian lingering at the desk, chatting quietly with Strauss; both laughed at something Julian had said, but when Julian turned away, he caught Paul’s gaze and rolled his eyes.
Paul was nearly the last to finish; when he brought his exam and term paper to the front, there was nothing to distract Strauss from his approach, and Paul knew he wasn’t going to get away as easily as Julian had. He tried to summon something banal and trivial to say, something that demanded a response he’d be able to roll his eyes at as well. But he couldn’t think of anything, and Strauss wouldn’t have let him get away with it anyway. All he could do was watch silently, shouldering his knapsack and chewing the inside of his cheek, while Strauss lifted the essay’s cover sheet with the end of his pen.
“‘Morality as Social Control and the Ethics of Obedience’—straight out of the gate, we know this is a Paul Fleischer creation.” He said it amiably, even with affection, but Paul blushed and furiously avoided his eyes. “I do look forward to straining my eyes at those great, galloping Germanic sentences of yours—with you it’s never a boring read . . . You’ve taken the Milgram example rather to heart, haven’t you?”
Paul picked at a loose thread on his knapsack strap and stared at the corner of the desk. “It didn’t say anything I didn’t already know,” he said in a flat monotone. “Other people might understand too, if they weren’t so—so lazy and atavistic they don’t bother thinking for themselves, if they were smart enough to pay attention. But then of course the results would be different—”
Strauss lowered the cover sheet again. His smile was solemn and infuriatingly patient, as if he were trying to talk down a fretful child.
“I understand,” he said, “that yours is a meticulously researched pessimism. Justified, even, to a certain extent. The trouble lies in the same thing that makes it seductive, especially at your age—a certain heady isolation in believing that you, and you alone, are burdened by the truth. That’s what concerns me about your approach, Mr. Fleischer. It tips into nihilism if one isn’t careful.”
The door behind him pulled like gravity. When he glanced over his shoulder, he expected to find Julian waiting, but he’d already gone.
Strauss was watching him expectantly. Paul tried, very weakly, to smile, but he took a step backward even before he spoke.
“Have a good summer, Professor,” he said.
Sunlight sliced through the hallway. Julian was leaning next to the window by the stairwell, cigarette in hand. When he caught sight of Paul, he seemed unsure what he ought to do with his face; after a moment he settled on a smile, but it was too nervy and joyless to be convincing.
“Ma’s making you that thing with the mushrooms for dinner.” Paul watched Julian closely as they descended the stairs. Usually when they walked together, they fell effortlessly into step, but today Julian was moving just a shade too quickly. “She insisted,” he said, “so I hope you weren’t lying when you told her you liked it.”
He had intended the remark to be a benign distraction, but Julian stared at him as though the news had struck him silent. “Why would she do that?” he said. He had an odd, fierce look, as if he were trying to hide his alarm.
Paul couldn’t make sense of it, so he shrugged and tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed. “She was just trying to do something nice for you, I guess.”
Julian’s mood abruptly changed after that, though Paul didn’t dare ask why. He became very quiet and still, speaking to Paul’s family only when prompted. The nervous energy didn’t leave, but he kept it under tight control. He was polite but far less effusive about the meal than Paul’s mother had likely planned. After dinner he helped Laurie with her French homework in the living room, but he didn’t tease her as usual or theatrically read the textbook passages aloud—he didn’t show the slightest enthusiasm for the task at all. Laurie seemed to decide this was a personal insult. When they’d finished, she mumbled her thanks, then picked up the cat from Julian’s lap and carried it upstairs to her room.
“Well, I thought dinner was lovely,” Paul heard Audrey tell his mother. They were in the kitchen, tidying up before their detective show. “Teenage boys, for god’s sake, nothing ruder on this earth. I’m sorry, Ma.”
Even from the hallway, he could hear the weight of his mother’s pause.
“He was just sad, honey,” she said, as grimly as if she were taking this into evidence.
11.
For their last day together, Julian had unexpectedly asked to accompany Paul on a hike. Barely believing his luck, Paul had offered more palatable alternatives in case it was a bluff, but Julian insisted. “I want to see what you like so much about it,” he’d said, just skeptically enough that Paul was able to believe him. Now that their few dwindling hours together had actually arrived, Paul suspected that what Julian was really after was novelty. It was something Julian’s own family had never done, so drastically un
familiar that it might distract him from his flight in the morning. Julian’s mood was so tense and unpredictable that the slightest friction could make him snap, and Paul could hardly sleep the night before because he couldn’t stop imagining the mistakes he might make to set off Julian’s temper. If they parted on bad terms, he knew that would be the end of it. His family would get their wish.
Julian slept far more soundly, so much so that Paul suspected he’d stolen one of his mother’s sedatives. When the clock radio went off at half past four, Julian barely stirred; Paul kissed the nape of his neck, but he didn’t seem to feel it.
They had slept in a tangle, sheets kicked to the foot of the bed, the sleeping bag pristine on the floor. When Paul got up to shut the window, he noticed his door was slightly ajar, as if it hadn’t latched properly; the cat, predictably, had taken the opportunity to install itself under his bed.
He showered and dressed as quietly as he could, but when he reached the kitchen he found his mother awake. She sat alone at the table, soft hands wrapped around a tea mug. The only light came from the dying bulb above the stove, painting the edges of her face in yellow. Paul noticed for the first time that they had the same full upper lip, the same kittenish upturn at the outer corners of their eyes. For an instant, before she moved, his face wasn’t entirely his father’s; then she turned to look at him and the resemblance disappeared, as if it had never been there at all.
“You’re up early.”
“I’m looking for specimens today,” he reminded her. He suspected she would forget again as soon as he stopped speaking. “I’m taking one of Zayde’s loaner cars.”
She smiled at him wanly, tucking a stray lock back into her braid. No pill last night; he could tell from the uncanny outline of her hands, as if they were trembling just a shade too subtly for the movement to be perceptible to the naked eye.
She started to get up, but Paul quickly waved her back to her seat. She was wearing an old lavender cardigan over her nightgown, and the flat mother-of-pearl buttons clicked against the kitchen table as she sat back down. At first she pretended to ignore him while he prepared a thermos of Campbell’s soup and a stack of sandwiches, but now and then he could feel her eyes on his back.
After a while she pushed herself to her feet and arranged two slices of white bread in the toaster. For a long while she leaned against the counter, sipping from her second cup of tea. Her silence had become apprehensive.
“Your friend is going with you, isn’t he?”
Paul knew instantly that this was going to be a fight—his mother’s usual kind, wrapped in so many layers of earnest concern that she could pretend it wasn’t a fight at all.
“Maybe, if I can actually get him out of bed this early.” He stared at his hands and pretended to be raptly focused on the task of wrapping the sandwiches in wax paper.
Another long silence. Paul stacked the sandwiches in a bag; his blush receded slowly until it lingered only at the edges of his ears. His mother stood with her back to the counter, taking tiny bites from her toast. She hadn’t put anything on it, not even butter; Paul wondered if she was sick to her stomach.
“Paul,” she said, and her careful tone made his own stomach drop. “You know I’ll always love you. We all will.”
He had to stand very still. All his energy went toward reassuring himself that the ground hadn’t really pitched beneath his feet.
“It’s just that it’s hard to explain to the neighbors why you and Julian spend so much time together,” she said, setting aside her dish. “Because it’s—well, it’s strange, Paulie. If it were a group of boys, it’d be one thing, but just the two of you . . . And we’re all a little worried about you, because you really only have the one friend—and I’m proud of you for starting to make friends, I really am, but—”
“But what? Spit it out, Ma, what are you actually asking?”
At first she made a vague gesture and looked away, but he could see her fighting against her own cowardice. She drew her spine a little straighter and met his eyes.
“When you two go out,” she said, voice shaking, “are you trying to meet girls? Or is it just the two of you, off in your own little world?”
“I don’t think that’s any of your business.” His tongue tripped on the b, one of his childhood enemies. He knew better than to hope she wouldn’t notice.
“Just tell me.” She was on the verge of tears, which he felt was monstrously unfair. “Just tell me there’s a girl—I won’t get angry, if you two are out there chasing shiksas, you wouldn’t be the first, just tell me so I’ll know at least you’re a normal boy—”
“I’m done talking about this,” he said, or meant to say, but he couldn’t hear his own voice and wasn’t sure the words made it out intact.
“Just tell me I’ll be able to look the neighbors in the eye without being ashamed. Please, Paul. It’s been hard enough for us this last year, I’m begging you, don’t make it worse.”
From a great distance, Paul heard a loud bang, as if a car had backfired two streets away. Only belatedly did he realize he had slammed a cupboard, hard enough to scar the doorframe.
“So you’re ashamed because of Dad?” He was so furious that he didn’t even stammer. “All this time I thought you just missed him, but no, I was giving you too much credit, the whole show you’re putting on is so the neighbors will know how goddamn embarrassed you are.”
His mother’s mouth fell open in shock. When she didn’t answer, he pressed on ruthlessly rather than let it go.
“The only person who should feel any shame did a pretty good job of ensuring he never had to answer for anything again. So what, we have to fucking apologize to the neighbors because he’s not here to do it for himself? Or are we ‘ashamed’ because we’re supposed to have driven him to it?”
“No.” It was less a word than a pained exhale, as if he had struck her in the gut. “No, honey, that’s never—it isn’t your fault, no one thinks it’s your fault, no one would ever—”
“Maybe they drove him to it.” Paul heard a laugh, but it couldn’t have come from him; it was too sharp to have left his lungs without slicing them apart from the inside. “Ever think of that? All most people care about is pretending everyone is exactly the same as they are, and he wasn’t, he couldn’t be, he knew too much about what the world really is. Those people don’t care about anything except reinforcing their own fucking normalcy by making you reflect it back at them—”
His mother exhaled hard.
“Paul.” She didn’t quite snap at him, but he could see the effort it took not to. “Honey, there were a lot of things going on with your father, and I don’t . . . You might not believe me, but I get angry, I do, I get terribly angry that people can’t understand. But there are limits,” she said desperately, “to what you can expect people to understand without living it, and that’s not something they’re doing to you. You can’t fight everybody all the time, you still have to live with them—”
“Hell if I do.” His voice nearly broke, but he didn’t dare let himself fall silent lest the weakness reach his face. “I’m done trying. Dad tried, he spent his whole life trying, and I refuse to end up the way he did.”
At first he felt a miserable thrill of adrenaline. He hadn’t let her turn her suffering into a problem for him to solve. Perhaps he had finally proven to her that he wasn’t the malleable, fearful child she assumed he was. But then the fury cleared, and he saw that she wasn’t actually the relentless crush of need he always felt from her; she was just a woman, sad-eyed and small in her faded cardigan. As if for the first time, he realized that she wasn’t only his mother, but a widow. That once she’d been only a couple years older than Paul was now and had fallen in love with a boy, never knowing that the boy would wait alongside her for twenty years before taking his service pistol into the garden shed.
There had been a note pinned to the shed door; Paul knew because he’d heard his grandparents talking about it when they thought he couldn’t hear.
It was nothing elaborate, just a plea to call the police rather than look inside. He’d thought at the time that it was foolish and pathetic of her to disobey, as if she had merely disbelieved the warning. Only now did he understand that she hadn’t failed to comprehend the horror. She had faced it knowingly, without question, because even the slimmest hope outweighed the lifetime of nightmares. It was such a profound act of love that it agonized him even to imagine it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and the apology was as inadequate as the belated, horrifying empathy that accompanied it. “Ma, I’m sorry.”
He could see the effort as she pulled herself back inside her outlines, swallowing the pain to fester inside her. Had she learned that trick from his father, or had they taught it to each other?
“I hurt you,” she said. I hurt you as much as you hurt me, was what it really meant. “Forget I said anything, sweetheart. Please. It was never supposed to hurt you.”
He didn’t answer, or even look at her. When he gathered his belongings and hurried up the stairs, she made no attempt to stop him.
12.
“I’ve always thought this might be where he first saw an opening,” said Julian.
Paul glanced over to the passenger seat. Julian looked sickly in the dull morning light, shadows deepening the crescents under his eyes until they echoed the hollows of bone underneath. He’d brought the chess book with him, and Paul knew even without looking that he had returned to Kazlauskas v. Kaplan. Other games caught his interest now and then, but only that one held it.
“You can’t tell from the notation,” Julian went on, “but Kaplan took the longest time to answer this move from the white bishop. It was a great move, but not so aggressive that he’d think he was in really serious trouble. I’ve always wondered why he took so long, and then to decide on such a standard reply—but god, how can this be it? It’s a strong move, black spends the next few turns trying to dig out from under it, it’s not as if Kazlauskas made a mistake.”
These Violent Delights Page 10