“Drives Clarissa crazy,” his father said.
“I don’t care as long as we don’t get bugs or mice. Everybody should have a room of one’s own. At least one room.” She rolled her eyes and scowled. “Would you listen to me? Like that’s my original idea.”
Robbie smiled wanly and nodded, recognizing the allusion. But he couldn’t look Clarissa in the face now, after staring at her so intently for days. When they returned to the dining room and the maid served them a breakfast frittata, it was Clarissa who gazed at him for a long moment. Then she said, “Is it terribly forward of me to say you look a lot like your father? I mean handsome, of course.”
“Oh—thanks.” Robbie glanced at an empty dining chair across the table and pursed his lips. “Most people say I favor my mother.”
“They do?” his father said. “You’re not at all like your mother. You don’t even have her coloring.”
“She must be a beautiful woman, then,” Clarissa said.
“That’s what most people say.” He’d forgotten that Clarissa and his mother had never laid eyes on each other because his mother had so many negative opinions about Clarissa, whom she alternately called your father’s marital aid and the fair-haired nightmare from Cleveland.
Robbie glanced over at his father, who had grown red-faced.
“So you’re getting your degree this year?” Clarissa said. “Your father says you’re a remarkable student.”
Robbie said, “I don’t know about that.”
“Robbie is studying English,” his father said. “The all-purpose major.”
“That was my major in college,” Clarissa said. “I’m the black sheep from a family of scientists. My parents run a research lab and all my siblings are doctors except for my brother, who’s getting his master’s in comp. lit.”
“Her brother’s a ladies’ man,” his father said. He winked at Robbie. “How are things going for you in that department?”
Robbie fidgeted in his chair. That department? They’d never discussed Robbie’s inclinations before—it was one of a thousand uncovered subjects from the past five years—yet somehow he’d always assumed his father knew about him, and he wasn’t about to blurt out the information now in front of a stranger. The one time he’d broached the subject with his mother her response was “I figured that,” as if he’d revealed a preference for beef over chicken or dogs over cats or boxers instead of briefs, and they hadn’t said another word about it. He understood most families didn’t discuss sex. Yet the whole topic seemed especially sealed off by his father’s wayward carnality, the way families of alcoholics rarely discussed liquor.
“Oh god, Philip. Please don’t embarrass your poor son.” Clarissa rolled her eyes and touched his father’s forearm. “Nobody wants to talk about romance with his parents. I certainly didn’t. Right?” She turned to Robbie.
“Who wants to talk about romance with anyone?” Robbie said, trying to mimic Clarissa’s breezy tone. He could only be grateful to her for extricating him.
His father scowled and squinted simultaneously, as if constipated. Robbie recalled the expression. That was how his father looked whenever he needed something and got frustrated. It was oddly comforting to see it again. Then his father cracked a smile.
“All right, then, I’ll rephrase it,” his father said. “Do you have any special friends back at school?”
“Sure. My friend Maize,” Robbie said. Strictly speaking, it was true; Maize was his most “special friend” by a mile. He could already imagine the conversation where he’d describe everything about this moment to her—not only this stilted exchange but every other detail he could summon, down to the ironed damask napkins.
“Maize?” his father said. “Is that a girl? What kind of hippie name is that?”
“It’s very interesting,” Clarissa said. “It sounds Native American.”
“It sounds like produce,” his father said.
“It’s not Native American. Actually you’ve met her,” Robbie said. He stiffened in his chair as if his own name had been insulted. “Back when you still lived in our house. Maize and I went to high school together.”
“No—I did?” Like a child who’d been lightly slapped, his father raised his chin and blinked in mystification. The first time he’d met Maize years ago, he asked Robbie the very same question (“What the heck kind of name is that for a girl?”) after having greeted her with a big smile and a hug hello in their living room. Later he commented to Robbie that Maize was a “cutie-pie” by way of heterosexual encouragement, and Robbie had stared at him flatly. He didn’t want to recall any of that now—it still made him cringe—but it came back to him anyway.
Apparently his father had blacked out that whole episode like countless other things from his past life. Out of sight, out of mind, as Robbie’s mother often said with fake stoicism when she spoke about her husband. But that was just something she said. That was possible only if you were the one who’d escaped; the people who stayed behind were left to dust the same old memories again and again like unpaid janitors.
“You really should hear your father brag about you,” Clarissa said, startling Robbie out of his reverie. “He tells everyone you’re at the top of your class. He says you never stop working, just like him. Chip off the old block and all that.”
“Oh,” Robbie said.
“He just made Phi Beta Kappa and he’s in the running for valedictorian,” his father said.
How on earth did his father know that? Had the dean of students sent a copy of his congratulation note all the way to Rome? Certainly Robbie hadn’t told him. He hadn’t even said anything about it to his mother or Maize.
“So you’re brilliant and modest,” Clarissa said. “That’s refreshing. Pardon me for saying it, but so few gifted young men are. They don’t know how to handle it. They offer up their genius for your admiration and heaven help you if you don’t genuflect.” She laughed softly. “It’s sort of funny if you’re in the mood for it.”
Robbie shrugged at the silver candlesticks. When a silence fell over the table except for the distant clatter of Concetta in the kitchen, Clarissa asked about his impending thesis and he suddenly felt obliged to fill the void. He talked about his senior project on Ulysses, the Molly Bloom soliloquy in particular, and the parallels between that final section and the opening chapters of Proust. He described his research on early modern painting and the Dada manifesto and threw in asides about Tristram Shandy and Svevo (whom he’d never heard of before Tonia Cantor) and he chattered about ready-mades and Beckett and Duchamp. As he heard himself rambling he blushed, shamefully aware that he was acting like one of those young men Clarissa had just mentioned, not merely defeating the silence over the table but also, he suspected, justifying his expensive education to his businessman father, who worshipped productivity and loathed the idea of wasted time.
Why did Robbie still care about pleasing him? Old force of habit? Years ago his father would come home from the office, bear-hug Robbie, and greet him with the question “What did you accomplish today?” instead of simply saying hello. Robbie had learned to have an answer even if he’d done nothing.
By the time he stopped speaking Clarissa was leaning toward him over the dining table, bright-eyed and alert as a bird who’d located something shiny and delectable. His father sat erect with his nostrils flaring in a barely suppressed yawn. How ridiculous that the sight of his father’s boredom could still wound Robbie’s pride. How absurd.
“What amazingly complicated connections,” Clarissa said. “Amazingly sophisticated. It’s hard to believe you’re an undergraduate.” Her fingers drummed on the table and her voice rose in excitement. “You know, Virginia Woolf put me off Joyce more than she should have years ago. She was such an awful snob about his work. Do you know what she called Ulysses? Underbred! Can you believe that? You make me want to reread it immediately.”
“That’s amazing,” Robbie said.
“Are you going to go to graduate school?” Clar
issa said.
“I’m not sure.” Robbie looked back at the tabletop and hoped the subject would drop. But his heart was also fluttering pleasantly as if a cheer had gone up in his chest. Clarissa seemed genuinely fascinated by his outburst—a real audience—and she was stimulating to talk to, unlike his parents, who’d always regarded his cerebral side as an impediment to common sense. They always seemed to be waiting to point out how naïve he was in the world outside of books.
“Graduate school in English,” his father said. “That wouldn’t get you anything except a job as a professor.”
“You make yourself sound anti-intellectual, Philip.” Clarissa raised her eyebrows. “I think it would be great to be a professor—having a captive group of bright young people write down everything you say like apostles.”
Was that how J. and Tonia had viewed Robbie? At least at first, when Robbie was so eager to learn from them? What a shock it must have been when he announced he didn’t require their instruction anymore.
“I’m just saying,” Robbie’s father said, “that’s it’s useful to join the real world and trim your eyelashes.”
“I guess you could say that.” Clarissa turned to Robbie again and said, “You know your father. Ever the pragmatist. Wake up and smell the espresso.”
Robbie nodded and grinned. He didn’t completely disagree with his father, much as he sometimes fantasized about an academic life. When he considered J. and his fusty colleagues, what had once seemed romantic now looked like slow desiccation. It reminded him of the line about Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch: that if you put a drop of his blood under a magnifying glass you’d find nothing but semicolons and parentheses. No wonder someone juicy and fervent like Tonia Cantor was going crazy in such an environment.
“I was thinking maybe I’d try to get a job in publishing,” Robbie said.
“Book publishing,” his father said, “or new media?”
Robbie was stumped; he didn’t know the answer, having never given it sufficient thought, so he said, “Books.”
“Hmm.” His father laid his fork on his plate. “They don’t pay much in book publishing except at the top levels.”
“I don’t care. Book publishing. Yes. Books.” Robbie tried to fix a hard, challenging stare on his father but then his eyes flickered away to the tablecloth. “Or maybe, um,” he said, “maybe magazines.”
“The important thing is that you do what you love,” Clarissa said. “Right? You’ll succeed at whatever you’re passionate about.”
“Right. Sure.” Robbie nodded twice. As he watched Clarissa take his father’s hand, either in solidarity or a gentle warning to lay off his son, he wondered what she herself was passionate about. Why would a young, pretty, intelligent, and—he had to admit it—thoroughly charming woman like Clarissa throw in her lot with a workaholic businessman who made her move to another continent? Why would she consent to be the woman from his father’s ugly air-mailed photos—the blonde who embraced her shorter lover and smiled broadly again and again, but who never looked quite at home in her surroundings? If her motive was mere gold digging, as Robbie’s mother claimed, she’d sold herself cheap. His father was hardly a captain of industry. On a strictly mercenary level she could have done better.
No. It couldn’t be that simple, much as he wanted it to be. Clarissa must have really loved his father—at least at the start—to sacrifice so much of herself. Now and then you came across heedless souls like Clarissa and Tonia Cantor, who splurged their emotional currency without worrying about future impoverishment. You had to admire them even if they scared you to death.
Then again, Clarissa wasn’t pure at all. He touched his jacket so the postcards scraped against his chest again. He leaned toward her heat and then leaned back against the chair as she spoke.
“Your literacy will be useful whatever you do,” she was saying. “I admire erudite people like you, with the drive for scholarship.” She sighed and shook her head. “Though I read a lot—”
“She reads constantly,” his father said.
“—I’m not good at writing about it or doing what you just did, Robbie, you know? Synthesizing things. Something essential always gets lost.”
“Clarissa is a painter,” his father said, as if that explained it.
“Sort of. Not an accomplished painter,” she said.
“She’s terrific.”
“Ah, sweetheart?” She turned to Robbie and said, “Your father’s a wee bit biased.” She laughed.
“See for yourself. Those are two of her paintings there.” His father pointed to the left wall.
“Oh.” Robbie dimly recalled his father mentioning something about Clarissa’s paintings in one of his letters, as if selling her artistic side to his cultured son, but at the time he’d ignored it. Even now he found it unwelcome—information he didn’t want to synthesize—like the undeniable current of kindness in practically everything Clarissa had said today, and the fact that she was easier to converse with than his father or his mother. Her gentle wit and self-deprecation reminded him of Maize’s. They might have been friends if she weren’t his father’s girlfriend.
A small shudder quaked in him from someplace mysterious. He opened his mouth to ask Clarissa about her training, then he stopped himself. He followed his father’s pointer to the dining room wall and found something unexpected—not the dilettante paintings Clarissa had prepared him for, with sentimental nature scenes of waves and sunsets or muddy abstractions. Instead there were two matching portraits of a young man and a young woman against pale gray backgrounds. The outlines of their heads and bodies were at once clear and indistinct. Competing lines reverberated around their heads like loose haloes and inside their torsos, too, as if Clarissa had multiple ideas of who she wanted the figures to be, drew the boldest strokes around her original perceptions, and let alternative ghostly versions coexist alongside them on the canvas. The two portraits looked finished yet forever in flux—evolving and subject to change. The only part that seemed solid—crisply etched and fixed—were the legs raised in forward motion, as if this boy and girl could walk from this canvas to another any minute they decided to make the leap.
Robbie’s gaze lingered. For the moment he lacked any response besides “Huh. Huh.” It was one thing to say flattering things about the apartment furniture and another to exclaim over Clarissa’s talent.
Clarissa spoke to break his focus. “Wow. Look at the time!” she said. “I’d better go check on Concetta. I can’t imagine what’s taking her so long with the dessert.” She rose and wrapped her arms around Robbie’s father’s shoulders from behind, like a soft sweater. “My poor birthday boy, having to wait for his cake.”
“Hold off on that for now,” his father said. “I need a moment alone with my son. We have a private matter to discuss.”
“We do?” Robbie said.
“Okay. Whenever you two are ready,” Clarissa said.
“Man-to-man business,” his father said. “Not for a woman’s ears.” He grinned.
“Right-o.” Clarissa cupped her ears and turned conspiratorially to Robbie, speaking in a southern belle accent. “Mah delicate woman’s ears just shatter at the sound of anything serious, according to Big Daddy here.” She smiled and said, “I’ll go get lunch started while you chat.”
“Don’t—no,” Robbie said. Alarm was buzzing through him suddenly. Did he really have to be alone with his father now, after so many years? “I can’t stay for lunch.”
“No?” Clarissa looked startled, like a little girl whose new doll had just been snatched from her hands. “No? I thought we’d have the whole day with you.”
“My flight leaves this afternoon,” Robbie said.
“Well,” his father said. “It’s a workday, anyway. Come along then, Robbie.” He gestured stiffly like a receptionist in a doctor’s waiting room. This won’t hurt a bit.
Robbie followed him to the back of the apartment, toward his office, his legs quivering as he walked. He hoped this was only abo
ut handing over the tuition check and nothing more. In the long hallway he touched the photos in his breast pocket and he thought, Now or never, only Clarissa’s wounded expression had made him even more muddle-headed than when he’d arrived.
His father closed the office door behind them and said, “Sit down, Robbie. Let’s have a heart-to-heart.”
Heart-to-heart, man-to-man: the kind of cheesy phrasing Robbie heard only on bad TV or when his father went into patriarch mode. Clarissa was smart to mock it; after all these years it still made Robbie wince.
He sat primly in the corner of the office, on the Chesterfield sofa, and waited for his father to speak. Momentarily he considered extending his arm over the space between them and passing his father a photo. But his father broke his concentration by moving even farther away toward his desk.
“Before I forget,” his father said. He opened a drawer and drew out a large leather-bound ledger onto his desktop. He carefully tore out a check from its perforated binding, but he didn’t hand it to Robbie. Instead he left it there and joined him on the sofa. The cushion sighed as he lowered himself on it just a foot or so away.
“Well,” he said. “Here we are, father and son. I’m grateful to have this moment alone with you.”
“Yes,” Robbie said. “Sure.” But apparently that wasn’t enough assurance for his father.
“Grateful to have my handsome and brilliant son with me again today, on my birthday, after so much time.” He began to reach over toward the top of Robbie’s head, with his hand curled, but he paused as if unsure of himself now that Clarissa wasn’t around to smooth things over, and Robbie recoiled as if avoiding a jab.
His father cleared his throat. Robbie leaned back against the arm of the sofa to clear his head. He touched the stiff photos in his breast pocket again as if they were armor.
“I hope you know that I’ve missed you,” his father said, “and that I love you. And you know that your mother loves you more than anyone. You will always be our son no matter what has happened.”
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