I want to just get up and go back to my room, save him the trouble. That would be the nicest thing I could do, but then I remember all the effort it took me to get here in the first place. Besides, I’d like to let him know that I know what he’s thinking.
“It’s all right, Dad,” I say. “Take Sam Roth’s call in your room.”
He looks startled, but then the phone rings a fourth time, and he seems to realize that discussing this with me will have to wait, because if he lets it go much longer, he’ll miss that call. From my spot on the couch, I hear him say “Hello,” but then I hear his door latch shut, and then I don’t hear anything.
I’m getting kind of pissed at Sam Roth. Who the hell does he think he is, taking up all this space, taking up my whole house, taking my dad into the other room to be with him?
It’s the bottom of the fifth when my dad comes out. To tell you the truth, I’ve mostly been sleeping; it’s only because of the baseball game that I know how much time has passed. I woke up for a second when my mother and Pilot came home, but my mother only went into her room—my parents’ room—for a second, then she turned around and came back in here and settled herself with her laptop on the dining room table.
“Been on the phone all this time?” I ask when Dad finally emerges. He sits down on the couch and asks me for the score. I tell him and then he says, “No,” in answer to my question.
“What’ve you been doing?” I say it accusingly, like he’s the teenager caught doing something wrong. Smoking up in his room. Watching porn. Sneaking out.
He shoots a look across the room at Mom, who’s looking at us over the top of her computer screen. She doesn’t say anything, but Dad seems to be waiting for her.
“Dad, you won’t even look at me,” I say softly. I can’t remember my dad ever not looking at me. Okay, once, when we were visiting his family and I was three and wrestling with my cousin Sandy, who was also three, and I kicked her between her legs and she started bleeding down there, and all the grown-ups started freaking out, and my father had to explain to me what had happened.
But that was just that he was embarrassed. Also, I think he was trying not to laugh.
“Maybe we should go to brunch,” he says finally.
“What?”
“I think maybe we should all go to brunch. Aren’t you hungry?”
“No, Dad, I’ve got a hangover the size of Texas. I’m not particularly hungry.”
“You’ve got a hangover?” my mother cuts in, and at once my dad and I both turn to her, because this is the first thing she’s said. I find it somewhat ridiculous that my hangover is the thing she’s chosen to comment on.
Mom looks at me hard when she sees the incredulous look at my face. “No matter what else, Nicky, I’m still your mother, and we’ll talk about your drinking later.”
I’m too distracted by the first half of what she’s said to worry about the second half.
“What do you mean ‘still’? ‘Still’ implies that there was a before and an after and that something happened in between, and so some things are now different and some things are ‘still’ the same.”
Now I turn back to face Dad, looking at him hard. “Tell me when this switch happened that made Mom be ‘still’ the mom.”
“We’ve educated him too well,” Mom says, eyeing Dad. “I told you he’d figure something out.” She shoots Dad a look, like “I told you so.”
I’m getting more and more irritated. Whatever this is, it’s something they’ve discussed telling me about; something they’ve apparently disagreed about telling me about. And she’s acting like she’s proud or something; she just knew her little boy would catch on.
“Jesus Christ, Mom, this isn’t cute.” I know I shouldn’t be so smarmy; I should probably appreciate that she’s the one who actually believed I’d catch on to whatever the hell this is.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Dad says finally, standing up and beginning to pace the room. “That’s enough. I know it is. And I knew it would happen, I just … it’s been so many years since I put my name out there, I’d begun to think … But still, I’d hoped that this would happen.” He stops pacing now, and faces me. “I just never thought about telling you, I was so worried about what I’d say to him, and that’s not fair to you. That’s not fair to you. It’s just that he came first.” Dad laughs then. “He literally came first.”
“Dad,” I say, standing up to face him, an inch or two taller than him for about six months now, “what the hell are you talking about?”
“You sure you don’t want to go to brunch first?”
“Pretty darn sure.”
“When I was your age—for crying out loud, I wasn’t your age—when I was twenty-one, my girlfriend’s name was Sarah.” He stops. “I think we should sit down.” And he walks to the table, where Mom is sitting, and sits down in his chair next to her, and I sit down in mine across from them. The same seats we’ve always sat in, except on holidays when we have guests, who don’t know whose seats are whose. Mom snaps her laptop shut and pushes it away from us.
“My girlfriend’s name was Sarah,” he says again. “She was my first girlfriend, all through high school, and when I went away to college, she still lived in Troy, so I’d see her when I came home from school, for holidays and things. And my senior year I had to come home in the middle of the semester, during my midterms in the spring, and I had to meet a lawyer in the hospital, and I had to sign the papers.”
“What papers?”
“Papers, you know, the papers you have to sign for that.”
“For what?”
“For a baby.”
“Wait, what are you talking about?” I slouch more so that my shoulders curl over the table, so that I’m closer to my parents sitting across from me, like maybe if I get closer I’ll understand better.
“Sarah was pregnant. And then we gave the baby up for adoption.”
“Oh.” Now I lean back again, feeling ridiculously like I’ve been swaying back and forth in my chair throughout this conversation. And then a strange sentence weasels its way into my head: I am not my father’s firstborn.
“Oh,” I repeat. Troy is like a whole other world compared to New York, so maybe my dad was this whole other person there—someone with a past, someone who kept secrets.
“I think …” Now Dad hunches over the table, leaning toward me. “I think you have to remember that it was a long time ago, and it was a small town.” He sounds like he’s defending what a big deal he’s made of it. Does he think that I’m quiet because I’m thinking just adoption? Is there a disappointed look on my face, like I thought it was going to be something more, something bigger? If I look disappointed, that isn’t why.
“It was a small town and …” He pauses, and keeps leaning forward, like he’s trying to get closer to me, but I’m still leaning back against my chair and away from him. I think he’s literally biting his tongue, trying to keep himself from saying anything. “Goddammit, in any town, it’s a big deal.”
“Okay, I believe you. In any town.” I lean forward again so that he knows I’m not blowing him off. “You’ve been sneaking around the house like there was this big dark secret, and I can’t remember you ever having had a secret. I thought maybe Sam Roth was some guy trying to extort money from you.”
I laugh, even Mom laughs. But Dad doesn’t. He just says, “No, nothing like that,” and he gets up from the table, and when his back is turned, I notice my mother shaking out her hand. I see that her fingers are white, like no blood had been getting to them, and I realize that for the last five minutes, none had, because my father, under the table, had been holding her hand so tightly.
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do now. Am I supposed to go to my room? I guess he thinks my response was too small. Well, sorry, I don’t know the proper response to finding out your father made stupid mistakes when he was younger. Things like that don’t happen here. Not to anyone I know, not to anyone I go to school with. Maybe they weren’t
allowed to have sex ed at the public high school in Troy where Dad went. We all have sex ed, we all know we’re supposed to use condoms, and any of the girls I know—I think they would all know what to do, early on. I almost asked why Sarah didn’t do that, but then I thought that I had no idea what the abortion laws were in Ohio now, let alone—I do the math—twenty-nine years ago. And now that I think about it, I guess it wouldn’t be a very nice thing to say, given that Sam Roth is now a living, breathing twenty-nine-year-old person.
“Did he grow up in Troy, too?” I ask, finally, to my dad’s back.
“Hmm?” he says, turning around, looking down at me.
“Where did he grow up?”
“In Texas.”
“Texas?”
“Yeah, we knew that when we signed the papers. That it was a family in Texas.”
“Did you know they were Jewish?”
“What?”
“The name Sam Roth.” I say it carefully now, allowing the name to hold weight when before it was hollow. “It sounds Jewish.”
“No, we didn’t know. Actually, I haven’t asked him. He might be Jewish.”
“You didn’t think that when you heard that name?”
Dad shakes his head. Sometimes Mom and I forget that he’s not Jewish, so he doesn’t think of things like that. I’m sure it was one of the first things Mom thought. I bet she wonders if he was raised religiously. I wasn’t.
“I’ve never been to Texas.”
“Me either,” Dad says, “not even on a business trip.”
I try to think of something that I know about Texas, something that would help explain Sam Roth.
“Is he a Republican?” I say, and finally, Dad laughs.
“You know,” he says, “I’ve been thinking about that for almost thirty years. I’m too scared to ask him.”
Counting the Steps
Making Dad laugh seemed like the right time to make my exit, so I said I had homework. But I’m in my room now and I haven’t even made the pretense of picking up a book. I haven’t sat down on the bed or the floor or at my computer. No, I’m standing in the middle of my room looking at the floor, and then at the ceiling, and then out the window, and then at my bed, and at the pile of books beside it, calculating just how many steps it will take me to get from the center of my room to the bed (I figure five), and then how much effort it would take to reach my arm out to lift a book from the top of a pile, and then how heavy it would feel while I brought it down onto my lap, and then how far I would have to lean back to turn on the lamp on my nightstand, and then how long it would take me to fix my pillows so that I could sit up while I read. But wait, I’d need a pencil to underline and make notes while I read, and my pencils are on my desk, next to my computer, clear on the other side of the room. So if I’d done that, if I’d made all that effort to get to my bed, get my book, turn on my light, and adjust my pillows, I would have had to get up, walk a good seven or eight steps to my desk (wait, how big is my room, anyway?), pick out the right pen or pencil, and then go all the way back to the bed, pick up the book again, adjust the pillows again, and it would have been a ridiculous amount of effort to expend before I could even begin to do my homework.
I think I’m better off standing right here instead. And I try to come up with something that I can do from right here, the center of the room, a place I’ve begun to think of as my spot, like actors who have spots they have to hit on a set or onstage. If they’re not in the right spot, then whole scenes can be ruined. Enormous efforts are made that surround their being in their spot—lighting arrangements, camera arrangements—to say nothing of the spots of the other actors with whom they’re performing. One actor blows his spot and then all those other details would need to be adjusted.
And so I think, I really do think, that I should stay in my spot right now.
My cell phone is on my dresser, and that’s only an arm’s length away. I can reach my phone without leaving my spot. I grab it, careful, very careful not to drop it, because if I did, surely the battery would pop out and slide along the hardwood floor, and then I’d be shit out of luck, because I’d never be able to retrieve it without leaving my spot, and I’m sure as hell not leaving my spot right now.
I hold it in my hands for a minute, begin scrolling through my contacts. I can’t call Stevie, even though his number was probably the last one I’d called so I’d just have to hit send to redial him, minimal effort for sure. But I can’t call Stevie because I’d tell him about my dad, and I get the feeling that my dad doesn’t want me to tell Stevie about this. I can’t think of anything I’ve ever not told Stevie, but I can’t think of ever having had a secret before. Only little things like sneaking out at night or the first time I smoked pot or got drunk, which of course I told Stevie, and eventually probably even told my dad about, too.
But I don’t want to tell Stevie about Sam Roth, because first I’d have to admit how I was a big baby who was jealous that some stranger’s phone calls were taking my dad away from me, and then I’d have to admit that I came up with that ridiculous extortion theory, and then I’d have to tell the truth, and then I’d have to talk about how pissed I am, and I just don’t feel like explaining anything right now.
But who else is there, besides Stevie, to call? And I have to call someone. Otherwise, I’m just some creep who’s psychologically glued to his spot, holding a cell phone and pressing the buttons like he doesn’t know which ones do which things.
I call Eden. Her number’s been in my phone for months. I got it from someone else—how pathetic is that—but I call Eden, who maybe won’t pick up when she doesn’t recognize my number, but I call Eden, because it’s not like I can make a bigger ass out of myself than I did last night, right? I mean, it would be rude not to call her and say sorry about your shoes; did I get your shoes?
“Hello?”
I don’t say anything. I really didn’t think she’d pick up.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Oh God, she doesn’t recognize my voice and she’s just pretending she knows who I am. Who does she think I am? Some other guy, some guy who calls her all the time, whose voice she would recognize. Maybe she has a boyfriend from another school.
“It’s Nick,” I say. I want to make sure that’s clear.
“Yeah,” she says. Maybe she did recognize my voice after all. “What’s up, Nick?”
I’m up, I think. I’m standing up in my spot.
“Nothing much. How about you?”
“Arrr,” she purrs, and I imagine that she’s still in bed maybe, maybe she’s exhausted from last night, too, maybe she’s reaching her arms up over her head to stretch, and maybe as she does so, her shirt lifts up a little, exposing her midriff. I imagine her stomach white, whiter than her arms and legs, because she would wear a one-piece at the beach, one of those suits that look like they’re from the 1950s. Her stomach would feel like a mattress with clean sheets pulled tightly over it, and it would be warm when I touched it.
“Just hanging out. Procrastinating, mostly,” she says.
“What’re you supposed to be doing?”
“Studying for Barsky’s history quiz on Tuesday.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess I’m supposed to be doing that, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” I echo. “So,” I say, and as I say it, I take a step, outside of my spot, screwing up the whole scene. And then another step, and another, and then back, stepping back toward my spot, but then I step right through it, and on behind it. I’m pacing.
“So, how about we procrastinate together? Or maybe study together—tomorrow, after school?”
“Study?”
“Well, we’d have every intention of studying, of course.”
“Of course.” I imagine she’s rolling over now, resting her chin on her hand, waiting to hear what else I have to say.
“But if we just happened to get distracted—”
“By what?” she interject
s, and now I imagine that she’s sitting up. Shit, did she think I was coming on to her? Or wait, did she like that I was coming on to her?
I mean, I don’t want to not come on to her. But I shouldn’t be too overt about it. And I certainly shouldn’t do it accidentally, like I think I just did.
“Like, things that might come up.” Shit, did I really just say things that might come up? I’m a walking cliché of bad, bad lines from bad, bad movies.
“Like, you know, meals that need to be eaten, highlighters that run out of ink. Paper cuts, which, you know, we could incur while studying, that would then have to be attended to.”
“Studying can be fraught with danger,” she says.
I think she’s flirting with me. Halle-friggin-lujah.
“It can. Best not to do it alone.”
“Absolutely.”
“So, tomorrow, after school.”
“Absolutely.”
Well, now at least if I call Stevie, chances are I won’t find time to say anything about Sam Roth.
After School
The subway is pretty crowded on the way down to Tribeca. Crowded enough that I stand while Eden sits. She can’t cross her legs because that would take up too much space, so her feet are firmly on the ground. I stand with my legs on either side of hers, my hand on the metal bar above both of us so that I don’t fall with every stop and start. I try not to look down her shirt; as much as I want to see her chest, this isn’t exactly the way I had in mind. But I can’t help seeing the edges of her bra, white and shiny, and even though I’m hanging on, my legs bang into hers at every stop, my knees hitting her thighs, and even through my khakis, I can feel the warmth of her bare legs. I want to hold her like that, my legs pressing on hers from either side, to show that she is mine; but she isn’t, so I don’t.
Before I met Eden in the school lobby today, Stevie pulled me aside to wish me luck. He stuck a handful of condoms in my backpack.
“Got these from the nurse’s office for you,” he said, patting my shoulder.
The Lucky Kind Page 3