Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  “How long has he been like this?”

  “Since right after the election.”

  “He seemed all right the last time I saw him.”

  “He seemed all right to me, too, for a few days. But then ever since it’s been just as if he lost the election, and the news has finally sunk in.”

  When I come over that night, I find he is in the deepest emotional trough I have seen him in since he came back from Vietnam a quarter of a century ago. His dream has been realized. To look at him, though, you’d think exactly the opposite was true. He is distracted, speaks in monosyllables, and has dark circles of fatigue under reddened, sorrowful eyes.

  He seems unable to discuss it. Not with Laura, not with Jeannie, not with me. Of course, he has had problems with Laura, Jeannie, and me, the people closest to him. If there had been an easiness between him and even one of the three of us, he might have been able to talk to someone about his issues with the remaining two, gotten some things off his chest. Without that avenue open, he was left to marinate in his grievances.

  While other newly elected officials were taking vacations, hiring staffs, and visiting news shows, Bobby did nothing and went nowhere, sleeping ten and twelve hours a day and spending the rest of the time staring off into space. The physical rigors and emotional toll of his long campaign were part of it, but after a week and then another passed with no refreshment of Bobby’s spirit, his family began to worry. Laura said Thanksgiving was the grimmest holiday she could remember, the air thick with unspoken issues and unresolved tensions.

  And there were also problems with Annie, ones I hadn’t heard of until after the election. Back at the end of the summer, Annie had asked Laura to get her birth-control pills because, she said, she intended to sleep with Alexander Stafford. Laura did everything she could to talk Annie out of it, begged, pleaded, and cajoled. Pie listened, shook her head, and said with a shrug, “It’s going to happen with the Pill or without it.”

  Laura, faced with this logic, miserably decided it was better to happen with the Pill. Whether Annie got Alex to wear the condoms Laura gave her was a question Annie would not discuss. Whether Pie felt such details were private or whether she enjoyed tormenting her mother with agonies of uncertainty was unclear.

  Whatever her motivation was, their communication problems were made a lot worse after Laura broke the news to Annie about Alex’s perfidy. At first Annie, in florid outrage, accused her mother of making it all up in order to break them up. But when that night an embarrassed Alex admitted the phone-tapping to her, saying his parents had asked him to do it, and then he suggested they ought not to see each other anymore, Annie slammed the phone down and cried alone in her room for hours. She at last emerged and blew up, blaming the whole mess on her father’s disgusting career.

  Bobby looked at her and nodded absently.

  I come over one more time. Sitting in his small study, Laura and I both press him to tell us what is going on.

  “This continued depression is not right,” she says. “It’s not normal.”

  Bobby snorts humorlessly at the word normal.

  “They say talking about it is supposed to make you feel better,” I offer. “So talk.”

  He shrugs. I can tell by the look on his face that we will get nowhere this way. Laura keeps trying, anyway.

  “Talking won’t change a thing,” he says.

  “No,” she says. “But it might change how you feel.”

  He greets this observation with silence. He gazes out the window of his study, looking as if he wishes he were somewhere else, anywhere else.

  Laura tries for a while longer. More silence. Giving me a helpless look, she announces she’s going to make some coffee.

  He continues to gaze out the window after she leaves. I look out and don’t see anything in particular.

  “My car’s not running right,” I say. This is true, but I haven’t the faintest idea what has made me bring it up at the moment.

  Bobby looks at me with the first faint flicker of interest I have seen in his eyes since the election.

  I suddenly remember an old junker of a car he had in high school. With it, he’d introduced me to the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. He loved to make the engine in that rusty heap run like a top.

  “What’s wrong with it?” he says.

  “Started slugging and lurching on the way over here.”

  He nods as if I have presented him with an important problem.

  “EGR valve?” he says.

  “I was thinking maybe some water got into the fuel line from my accident. Take a look?” I ask.

  He sits there, blank, for a moment. Then he gets up. “Why not?”

  Moving slowly, he dons a jacket, gets his battered old toolbox, a flashlight, and a bottle of Drygas from the garage. I start the car; he listens for a while, first inside, then outside with the hood up, while I step on the gas. He adjusts the idle and watches the accelerator linkage to make sure it’s not getting tangled. At his request, I turn the engine off.

  “Cylinder compression,” I suggest.

  “Tuned it recently?”

  “Within the last couple of months.”

  “Not likely, then.” We go around the front and look at the engine, two doctors with a sick patient. He checks the oil, looks underneath for leaks. Nothing.

  Staring into the engine compartment, he says, “Fuel filter maybe. Computer malfunction.” He removes the spark plugs one at a time and examines their integrity and the gap between each electrode. I check the air filter. “Plugs look all right,” he says.

  As I tighten the wing nut to the filter cover, I say, “So what’s the problem?”

  He glances at me, aware from my tone I’m not talking about the car anymore.

  He starts pulling on the thick black wires around the distributor to see if any are loose. “I lied.”

  “Bobby, so what if—”

  “I’ve always held liars in contempt. If I’d had the guts, I’d have told the truth. But I wanted to beat Wheatley way too much for that.”

  “Saying you never had a drug other than grass is like jaywalking.”

  He shakes his head wearily. “It’s not the content. It’s that I told it. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t confused. When the chips were down, my desire to win was greater than my honesty.”

  “You’re being way too tough on yourself.”

  He shrugs and wipes his hands on a rag. “I learned something about myself in that moment. The reporter asked me the question, and in a flash I could picture all the shit that would follow if I told the truth. Or even if I ducked it one more time.”

  He looks at his hands, which are still dirty from the engine work despite his wiping. He has already spoken more in the last minute than he has in the last three weeks. “What did you learn?” I ask.

  “I like it so little, I guess you can say the discovery has tainted the win. I wanted to win honorably.” He looks back under the hood.

  “What right do they have to ask you about any damned thing they want and get an answer? Some things are personal, nobody else’s business.”

  “Maybe. But I didn’t say that, did I? I lied.”

  “Bobby…”

  He reaches down to a small wire near the distributor. “Here’s the problem, I think.”

  “What?”

  He switches on the flashlight and shows me the part on the insulation that’s chafed all the way down to the metal. Every time the wire makes contact with the engine wall, it would short out, affecting the ignition.

  Bobby takes some electrical tape from his toolbox and wraps the worn area.

  “That ought to do it,” I say.

  “Ought to,” he says. “Unless it’s something else.”

  Bobby and Laura talk long into the night that night, and for several nights to follow. Some decisions at
last get made.

  He agrees to go into counseling with her; she agrees to apply for an adjunct clinical professorship at George Washington, a post less secure than the one she has here, but also one she is almost certain to get. Whether she comes to Washington soon, however, will be determined by whether Annie wants to finish out her year at her old school or is willing to move.

  Annie changes her mind nearly every day about her preference. In the meanwhile, Bobby gradually but steadily begins to lift himself out of his torpor. He talks to Jeannie. He talks to me. While soon it is pretty clear we will be his friends once again, there is also little question that he will never trust any of us, or himself, with the same innocence he did a few months ago.

  In between time, I begin seeing Cindy. First a meal here and there, once a movie, once a play. Her kids are not at all pleased with this development, and she herself has some pretty serious misgivings. She points out that while we both have a lot of baggage to cart along into a relationship, hers at least has the virtue of being unpacked for all to see. Divorce, two kids, a career. Mine has been locked tight for so long, no one, including me, has any idea what’s in there.

  I agree. And agree to see what I can do about it.

  “We’ve had some pretty serious conversations,” I say, “for two folks who haven’t even slept together.”

  “Never thought you’d ask,” she says lightly.

  Never thought I would, either.

  Two days before winter begins on the calendar—anticlimactically, since it has begun in the weather for the entire last cold and snowy week—I crunch my way up the path to Bobby and Laura’s house to deliver an armful of presents to put under their tree (Why Americans Hate Politics for Bobby, a new Eleanor Roosevelt biography for Laura, a modem for Jimmy, and a gift certificate to The Gap for Annie, usable here or, if she chooses, in Washington and its environs). I see as I walk in that the house is already stacked with packing boxes. The bookshelves in the living room and den are half-empty, gaping like mouths with missing teeth. But the house smells of fresh pine and warm earth, the new Christmas tree and its carefully wrapped root ball having thawed all day in the middle of the living room. Brendan and Jeannie and Laura and Bobby’s mother are all there sipping eggnog, and the Parrish children and their cousin Andrew are trying to untangle the wires to the Christmas lights they intend to string aloft before the early dusk. There is merriment at the moment, and even a kind of subdued joy in the room, though I know as the holiday nears—their last Christmas as full-time residents in the old house—for the grown-ups an edge of sadness will appear.

  For me the sadness is already there like a bone stuck in my throat. In a month the Parrishes will be half a country away, and who knows where they will be next Christmas. Jeannie and Brendan and Andrew will go with them, Jeannie with a job as a staffer on the House Committee on Environmental Affairs, and Brendan hoping that his proximity to some large Eastern cities will offer him some new customers. Kindly, Bobby has offered me a pick of jobs on his staff, but he knows I do not want to move away. I expect I will miss them probably even more than I imagine. For now I am trying very hard to take things, as they say at the meetings I have begun attending, one day at a time. Governor Roberts’ head of personnel has contacted me about an opening in the Civil Rights Division of the attorney general’s office, with offices many floors above the basement where I had my last employment there. But as tempting as such work is, I first have to see if I am up to returning to court or up to dealing with a steady flow of people.

  Still, for all its complications, that Bobby won his race may in the end mean almost as much to me as to him. I have begun to entertain the idea that not all golden things I touch must turn to lead. Laura tells me this kind of thought is what psychologists call magical thinking, although I’ve reversed it from its usual form. Either way, though, she says it’s a mode of belief belonging to preliterate societies and nearly all children.

  I muse on this for a while and am forced to concede the point. It doesn’t change the feeling, however. Had Bobby lost, I would have blamed myself. I suppose this means I still have some evolving to do. That, or I must get better acquainted with the tribe of preliterate people I carry around inside.

  As I enter the house, I get some warm greetings and hugs, including from Annie, who tonight at least smells not at all of cigarettes. After I put the packages near the tree and get my coat off, I’m given a glass of un-spiked eggnog to drink. I stand near the wood-burning stove in the living room with Brendan and Laura and warm my cold hands.

  “Where’s Robert?” I ask.

  “On the phone. Where else?” Laura says. “I swear he is going to personally thank every single person who voted for him by New Year’s.”

  “I thought the thank-you tour was a good idea,” Brendan says. “Going back at dawn to some of the factories for the change of shift to shake hands. Going back to diners and schools and malls. Hell, most pols do it only when they want your vote, not afterwards.”

  “Maybe it was nice,” Laura says, “but it wasn’t ten degrees below freezing at the factory gate before the election. He got a terrible cold out of it.”

  “Mom,” Annie groans. “You know there is no scientific evidence that being out in cold weather causes colds.”

  “I do know that, pumpkin. But increased stress lowers immune function. And freezing-cold factory gates at dawn increase stress.”

  Annie looks skeptical and returns to the task of untangling Christmas lights.

  “Are Cindy and the kids coming?” Laura asks me.

  “Right after Ken’s nap,” I say. I have become familiar with the workings of Cindy’s family, its comings and goings, and nappings as well. She, too, has passed up a choice of jobs with Bobby, preferring to take instead the position of chief editorial writer offered to her by her old paper. While not exactly a mommy-track job, it will give her far more time with her children than anything in Washington would have.

  Laura says, “I wanted them to be able to go through our give-away pile before the pickup tomorrow.” She gestures toward the utility room off the kitchen. I drift over there, curious to see what things have outlived their usefulness. Near the top of a heap of old toys is a stuffed rabbit, once white, now cream-colored with age and use, which Becky, when she was little, used to play with whenever she came over. On the way home, since we had to leave the rabbit here, she would amuse and console herself in her car seat by sticking out the first and middle fingers of her hand to make ears, bouncing her little fist, and chanting, “Hop the wabbit! Hop the wabbit!”

  I stare at the plush stuffed animal, seeing Becky’s plump hands around it and her soft round cheek pressing against its even rounder belly.

  “You okay?” Laura asks.

  “Fine,” I say. I pick up the rabbit and clear my throat. The fur is still soft and not too badly worn. “Can I have this?”

  “Sure,” Laura says. “But aren’t Cindy’s kids a bit old for it?”

  I nod.

  Laura looks at the rabbit for a moment, and when she looks up, I can tell she has remembered, too.

  Jeannie comes over, using a new sleek cherrywood cane Brendan has made for her. With the year coming toward a close, I keep thinking of Jeannie and Laura and Bobby and myself, and even sometimes of Freddie McMasters and Karen Gillian, and I keep concluding we have little choice but to find a way to live with ourselves and our mistakes and our pasts. There is no escaping them. And if there somehow were magically a way to do so, it would be a mistake to try.

  Jeannie glances at the rabbit and rolls her eyes. “Can I get you a blankie, too?”

  “Nah,” I say. “This’ll do.”

  We drink our eggnog and decide to move back closer to the stove. Jimmy calls up the stairs for his father. They’re almost ready to plug in the lights.

  Acknowledgments

  For critical readings of the manuscript, and o
ther advice and counsel, I am indebted to Elissa Gelfand, Daniel Peters, Alison Reeve, Ellen Rothman, Peter Ginna, and Molly Friedrich.

  To Annette Kolodny, for her encouragement long ago and present, my appreciation, as well as to Patrick and Susan Coleman, Ana Flores, and Gabriel Warren.

  For their many kindnesses and friendship during the time I wrote this novel, to Gus and Jackie, Randy and Sally, Liz and Jerry, Fran and Gene, Isabelle, Michael, John, Bev and Mike, Jane and Gordon, Carol and Ed, my gratitude.