“Well,” Robbie said. “Obviously.” His throat tightened. This seemed like a warm-up for a performance he didn’t want to attend. “Well.”
His father inhaled deeply and said, “How is your mother these days?”
“She’s fine,” Robbie said. “Considering.”
“Is she getting out much? Seeing people?”
“Sure,” Robbie said automatically. What he meant was that she was keeping company with him during school vacations, and with her maid five days a week, and with herself the rest of the time. After the separation she’d cut herself off from her few friends. But when Robbie saw the expectant look on his father’s face it occurred to him he’d misunderstood the question.
“Are you asking me if Mom’s, um, seeing men?” Robbie had to stop himself from scoffing. “Um, no. The answer to that is no.”
The last time Robbie had broached that subject with his mother she’d said, “Men? You must be joking. I’d rather have a root canal.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” His father frowned. “I’m genuinely sorry to hear that. It’s high time your mother moved on with her life.”
“It’s not easy for everyone.” Robbie shrugged, then felt his blood pressure rising. What the hell did he mean to signal with a shrug? “You know, especially after being so badly screwed.”
There. After years of waiting to say something like that, it had slipped out easily. He didn’t know quite how it happened—how he lost the self-control he’d maintained since the separation. Perhaps it was mere proximity or maybe his father’s sudden turning up of the heat—all his mawkish declarations of love love love—had gotten him woozy. Whatever. Yet now that Robbie had said it he was flabbergasted. He was supposed to pick up his check with minimum fuss and deposit his postcards and leave. But since his dining room monologue he’d gotten unmoored. He heard himself breathing and looked down at his hands, which had curled into fists.
“I will admit that I could have handled my departure better—much, much better,” his father said. “I’ll be the first person to admit that.” He nodded gravely. “I want you to know that I asked your mother for a divorce several times before Clarissa came into the picture and she refused me. Did she tell you that? Several times, and she always said no. I felt trapped. I don’t know—I panicked.”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” Robbie said. He felt himself shrug again. In a small voice he said, “But I guess none of it matters now.”
“Yes it does, Robbie. It matters a lot. Listen to me. I didn’t want it to turn out like this. I always wanted to be close to you and your mother, but I thought I had responsibilities that came first. I didn’t get to finish college like you, you know. I had to drop out of Columbia because my father was a drunk and we couldn’t afford it. He died with huge debts I had to pay off for years and I never wanted that to happen to you. I know I was obsessive about that—I admit it. I wanted you to have everything. Everything I didn’t have. So I worked two full-time jobs when your mother and I had you, and when I started my own business I thought if I just worked hard and made enough money everything would be okay. We would always be safe. Things would take care of themselves…”
“Dad,” Robbie said. He put up one hand like a stop sign and then the other. “Please. Don’t.”
What was his father doing? Why was he doing it now? Why had he saved it all up for this moment when he’d had five whole years to put it in a letter or something, and how could Robbie stanch it? He supposed he couldn’t, any more than he could stop himself at the dining table when he’d had an audience.
“… Your mother and I were happy for a while, and when we couldn’t get along anymore I thought, At least I have a son. I have my son. But by the time I left you would hardly say hello to me anymore, no matter how much I tried to hug you, like you’d taken your mother’s side and I was already the enemy.”
Robbie felt himself start shaking. What his father said was true, true enough. Robbie wished he would stop. His words spilled out in a torrent, and maybe they were Robbie’s fault because he’d dammed them up for months and years by refusing to communicate—refusing to give his father what Tonia Cantor cloyingly called satisfaction. Had Robbie foolishly thought he could get away with that forever? That all of it would just go away if he ignored it long enough?
“… But it wasn’t always like that with you,” his father was saying. “Listen to me, Robbie. Are you listening? When you were little you could never get enough of me. You’d sneak downstairs when I ate late suppers and cling to me while your mother slept. You had these pajamas—these baby blue pajamas with the feet attached. And I thought, Whatever else happens at least I have a son. I have my son. My little Robbie. My—”
His father’s voice broke, and his throat clogged, and before Robbie knew it great heaving sobs were emanating from his father’s lungs and his face was an utter mess.
This was not what he’d come here for. He’d come here for his education—the funds to continue his education so he could graduate. His impulse was to stand up and leave the room, at least until his father got hold of himself, and perhaps go further and leave the apartment completely. But he still hadn’t gotten his check and his father kept weeping more and more loudly—some wounded-animal sound from the center of his gut—and instead Robbie found himself inching toward him slowly on the sofa, as cautiously as if approaching an electrified border fence, close and then closer still, until his father’s hand was resting on the top of his head like a benediction.
All of it was happening, yet it wasn’t. There was a sense of unreality, a little the way nights with J. had always felt to him, because during them he’d think how strange it was that moments ago he wasn’t doing anything of the kind and in another moment he’d be back in his regular life, which had nothing to do with them. And always the same numbness afterward—not only because it was 4:00 a.m. and he was walking back to his dorm in the dark, but because the solitude that puddled around him scared him even more than anything he’d just done with his body, and he felt alienated, as if in a foreign country he couldn’t escape, and he wanted to cry out.
He leaned toward the noise—his father’s hand and his threatening body. He let the top of his head be stroked. His father’s hand was hot. Something was breaking loose above him and for a second he thought of a chick straining toward a lightbulb in a hatchery, arduously, messily freeing itself from a shell.
He closed his eyes and willed himself not to think about anything for a second. He didn’t want to think and he didn’t want to remember. But there were the blue pajamas his father mentioned, and his father stroking the little boy’s head the way he stroked it now. They were alone together. His mother was asleep and his father was eating dinner from a hot plate. Robbie was standing beside the kitchen table in his pajamas, sucking his thumb and observing his father raptly. And then the mirage evaporated and another one emerged: Robbie pacing the dark house in the middle of the night years later—was it ninth grade?—and approaching the home office, where he discovered his father weeping more violently than he wept now, as a television set chattered obliviously on a console. Robbie had stood there unnoticed and paralyzed in the hallway, not knowing what to do and terrified of knowing more. A sepia glare surrounded his father, a morass of complication and regret beyond the threshold. What was he crying about? Robbie hung back. Quietly he’d tiptoed to his room and gone to sleep as if he’d never seen it. His father left a few months later.
“When is Dad’s flight getting in?” he’d asked his mother that afternoon when she’d picked him up from school.
“That’s the thing,” she’d said, staring straight through the windshield at the parking lot. “It isn’t.”
He didn’t cry then. He wasn’t crying now. But something inside him spasmed as he sat folded against his father’s chest. He heard himself making strange little sounds—sighs and gasps—and he supposed he should speak to extract himself, but all that came out was “Daddy” mumbled into the old man’s dress sh
irt like a secret.
It was Clarissa who rescued them by knocking lightly on the door and calling, “Hello? Everything okay in there?”
At the sound they separated. His father cleared his throat and wiped his eyes. In a new and chipper tone he called, “Avanti.”
The door opened a crack and Clarissa’s smiling blonde head poked into the office. “Sorry to interrupt you guys, but you have a birthday surprise that refuses to wait.” She withdrew her head and whispered something into the hallway before a different head filled the gap again.
The moment Robbie saw it, he drew in a breath so sharp he nearly gasped.
It was the man from the photos in Robbie’s pocket. Clarissa’s boyfriend. Her lover.
“Look who’s here. Late as usual,” his father said.
“Happy birthday, Philip,” the man said in a rich baritone. “I’m far too polite to ask how old you are.” He flashed a smile full of big white teeth.
His father laughed and said, “You son of a bitch. You nearly missed my cake.”
Robbie started laughing, too, but differently from his father—loose and trilling and nearly hysterical. He couldn’t help himself. His father and Clarissa darted their eyes at each other in curiosity.
“I made up for my tardiness by bringing you a nice gift.” The door opened fully and the beautiful man strode into the room, wearing the same jeans he had in the photos, which Robbie had the wherewithal to shove deep into his pocket. He was carrying a small gold-wrapped package the size of a book. He gave it to Robbie’s father before turning to extend his hand. “Hello. Pleased to meet you,” he said. “You must be Philip’s son. I’m George.”
“Clarissa’s late brother,” his father said.
“I prefer errant to late,” George said. His large pillowy hand engulfed Robbie’s. “Your father makes me sound like a visitation.”
Clarissa followed him into the room and said, “My little brother’s doing graduate work in Rome this year, before he returns to the wilds of Berkeley, California.”
“My studies are a dodge—a pretext,” George said to Robbie, still smiling. He drew closer so that he stood with his waist at Robbie’s eye level. “An excuse to have a university pay for me to hang out with my big sister in Europe.”
George grabbed Clarissa and embraced her exactly as he had on the street. But this time Clarissa smirked.
“Yeah, right.” She slackened against her brother’s hip like a Siamese twin. “Don’t believe it, Robbie. George is very ambitious. He’s been working extremely hard this year.”
“Even if what he does isn’t a real job,” Robbie’s father said.
George left Clarissa’s side and threw his arms around Robbie’s father like a lover, kissing him noisily and repeatedly on both cheeks. Between kisses he said, “I adore you, Philip, even if you’re a philistine.” His father laughed at the insult and said, “You slovenly rat,” pretending to punch George in the ribs, as if this were a comic routine they’d performed many times before.
Robbie realized he hadn’t said anything since the interruption. He was stupefied. He should say something. But when he willed himself to speak all he could manage was “Oh—oh.”
“You’ll be getting a degree soon, too, right?” George said to him.
Robbie nodded. He twitched out a grin. He felt himself listing to the left. He told himself to sit down and compose himself before he remembered he was already sitting.
The bantering voices—his father, Clarissa, her boyfriend who was her brother—caromed around Robbie like projectiles he needed protection from, with George’s words registering the sharpest. Jesus, Robbie said to himself, wait till I tell Maize about this, at roughly the moment George was saying, “I can’t believe what a morbid room this is, Philip. Like a funeral parlor. I’m amazed you get anything done in here without falling asleep. My birthday gift to you should’ve been a halogen lamp.” In a jocular tone Robbie’s father told George to mind his own business. He wasn’t changing a thing. His office suited him fine exactly as it was.
It was a relief to be following them out of the office and down the hallway, though Robbie’s legs were still shaking. They walked back to the dining room, where a large white cake lay waiting, studded with many candles. The maid lit them while Clarissa got fresh napkins out of the sideboard. Clarissa rested her head on his father’s shoulder, appreciating the flaming cake, and when she reached her arm in Robbie’s direction he flinched—as if she were accusing him rather than inviting him to join them on their side of the table.
Clarissa thanked the maid in Italian and asked her to take a picture of all of them. Even with his faulty language skills, Robbie could understand that much.
He might have positioned himself on his father’s flank, but instead he stood next to Clarissa. Gently she pressed herself against him.
The flash went off. How soft and warm Clarissa’s body was, with a sweet scent that wasn’t overwhelming—vanilla or almond or a combination of the two. Robbie found himself on the end of a chain of linked torsos, one body over from his father, who was being embraced by George again. The maid pantomimed for them to huddle closer so she could get all of them into the shot behind the cake.
Three times the flash fired. Robbie supposed he was smiling. He was dazzled and he’d had little experience with this kind of huddle. Again and again the flash went off.
His father looked over at him and said, “I am going to need your help,” and for a hot second Robbie didn’t know what he meant. In his stupefaction the simplest things eluded him. But of course he was talking about the candles.
One final flash. The four of them were leaning over the cake with puckered mouths, extinguishing the tiny flares together. Or that’s what it looked like, that’s what the photograph would show for posterity. But only his father and Clarissa and George were making wishes as they sent little gusts in the same direction. At the moment the maid froze the image Robbie was somewhere else—already anticipating his impending exit, the hugs at the door, the promises not to be a stranger, his father’s murmured exhortation to please remember what they’d discussed, and the tremor in Clarissa’s voice as she said, “This was too brief! We didn’t get enough of you! Promise you’ll come back soon, promise!” and Robbie pushing away with thanks and claims that he must go, really he must get to the airport, sorry but it was time.
At the moment the picture froze Robbie wasn’t blowing on the candles like the others. He was still holding his breath.
* * *
Robbie was dazed when he hit the open air outside his father’s building. Now that it was midday the streets simmered with tourists and genuine Romans carrying parcels, calling out to the children who outpaced them, bustling to offices or appointments on exquisite shoes. The sun struck everything equally with a pitiless light. There was no cooler side of the street to retreat to for a stroll, so Robbie supposed he should head back and finish packing.
He resisted taking the same route that had led him to the apartment, although the familiar way would certainly be more efficient. His thoughts were still muzzy—bleary as if wadded up with batting. He lacked the will to text Maize and file a report about the reunion at the moment, which might have been just as well. Only when he was several blocks away did the details start to sink in, through the glaze of fear and surprise that had coated him while they first appeared: The way Clarissa and his father had touched each other whenever they spoke, just the way she and George had done in the postcards Robbie was still carrying. The way Clarissa and George sandwiched his father in an embrace as they’d joked with him and leavened him, summoning a blissful childish look on his face that Robbie had never seen before and had probably never worn himself.
No wonder his father wanted to be around Clarissa forever. She made it all seem so easy. Some people had the gift for intimacy while others didn’t, despite their other good qualities like brains or taste or a knack for numbers. The talent for intimacy wasn’t parceled out equally or rationally. It appeared in unlik
ely places yet it was absent where it seemed likely to thrive. Not that it was a necessity. Not that you couldn’t live without it. But like liquor or a first kiss, once you got a taste it was hard not to want it again, even if you were incapable of handling it well. Outside its fragile aura the rest of life looked drab.
Now Robbie stopped in his tracks and took the postcards out of his pocket. He leaned against a stony façade to study them again. Photos were supposed to be documentary evidence, but Clarissa and George looked different in these pictures than they had close up: sexier for their strangeness yet less vibrant. They looked like simulations of themselves, the stereotypical blonde and the hunk. All Robbie had captured accurately was the unstinting affection they felt for each other, the unselfconscious ease with which they touched and smiled and raucously laughed and leaned close as if listening to blood secrets. Their deep animal connection requiring no fear or vigilance—something Robbie had confused with sex—as when members of a species reunite far from predators to move gracefully as one body.
Robbie had never had that with anybody. Not even with J. in their most private moments together. Not even with Maize. Not even briefly.
When his towel had fallen in front of Carlo, he hadn’t done what he’d intended—turned to show himself fully with the light streaming around him. A sudden chill hit his naked torso. Carlo took a step toward him and Robbie grabbed the towel off the floor to cover himself again. He said “Scusi” and dashed past him to the bathroom to look for a robe. He closed the bathroom door and locked it behind him, repeatedly calling out, “Scusi, excuse me, scusi, excuse me,” through the wood until Carlo understood and finally left him alone with the breakfast tray. Even with the bathrobe on he continued to shiver.
One of the last things Tonia Cantor had said into his message machine was “You have a cold streak, you know that? You need to look out for that.”
And just before he’d escaped J. forever—left him so cruelly and brutally it made the backs of his own teeth ache—J. had said, “You know, I don’t think I can love you the way you need to be loved,” in the darkness of his bedroom, and Robbie had been too dumbfounded to reply—pretended he was asleep and hadn’t heard him—and J. had let him say nothing, as though one of them had farted in bed and they’d silently, politely agreed to let it dissipate into nothingness.
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