Stranger, Father, Beloved

by Taylor Larsen

  “Thanks for staying so long, Rebecca. You were a big help. Have a great night, and see you on Monday.” He tried to sound as normal as possible to conceal any trace of his insanity—the insanity he was sure everybody could see and that he never felt confident he could cover. It suddenly took all of his self-control not to reach out and pull her to him. Her loyalty and kindness that evening inspired an overwhelming need in him for the presence of another body. Even ­wrestling would suffice at that moment. Michael held his hands tightly together and walked back into his office, smiling like an idiot, then safely closed the door. Once inside, he began to pace around the room. He felt he wasn’t hard-wired right; his nerves ran on strange impulses, as if they needed some reprogramming.

  Michael contemplated going home, but that seemed entirely wrong. Home felt volatile, unsafe. Potential eruptions could happen at any time—such as a daughter rounding a corner and shoving him or delivering another awful slap. Or there was the chance that he himself might be the one to lunge out. Who knew what he was capable of, what he would do if he saw her? That satisfied look on Ryan’s face—just the sight of her might send him into a rage, and he wouldn’t be able to stop from hurting her or humiliating her in some way, putting her in her place.

  These thoughts were really too much for him. He sat down at his desk and looked around the bleak room. Well, since he was staying, he would need to make a little camp for himself on the floor. And he would need entertainment of some kind for the evening. A bottle. He would need a bottle of some kind of harsh liquid like vodka that would burn its way down his throat and create delirium. He grabbed his jacket and headed out. This time when he returned, he would be stocked—he would have the supplies he needed for the night to work out.

  * * *

  Tipping back the newly acquired bottle of vodka, Michael remembered the time when Ryan was seven and had gotten the notion that she had been adopted. He figured she must have seen some movie where a girl found that information out. He would catch her hunting around his office files, going through papers in each file cabinet, crying.

  “You’re our girl. I don’t know why you think you belong to someone else. Aren’t we good enough?” He would say it tenderly. He had found the whole thing extremely amusing, and he had felt his love for her grow as he watched her distressed face.

  “I’m sure of it. You don’t have to wait until I’m older to tell me. Tell me now.” Michael was down on one knee, and she had looked right into his eyes, searching them. One time she had collapsed into little sobs, saying “Tell me, tell me” repeatedly. He loved her strangeness and her intensely wound personality. He thanked God to have been given her. She would be the perfect companion for him, if only there weren’t so much distance between them now.

  The more Michael drank, the freer of his mind he became; the world was giddy and fun. He looked at the bottle of vodka in his hand. Half of it was gone. He could not believe that he had drunk so much. See, Nancy? See, world? He could hold his liquor. He felt like a boy again, sitting on the rug. The room was blurred, and he could not sit up without spinning, so he lay down and passed out drunk on his office floor.

  When he awoke, it was a couple of hours later. He switched to vodka mixed with the orange juice he had purchased. At some point later in the night, after his second screwdriver, he had left for a walk and had ended up at a store that sold adult movies. Miraculously, he had made it back to his office in his drunken state, and the neon yellow bag from his half-remembered excursion sat in the corner of the room.

  The night continued in a blur. He took one of his pills, which sent him to a deeper realm of drunkenness before he fell asleep and had a tortured dream of chasing something. He awoke reclined in his office chair with his feet up on the desk and the orange juice on the floor. He checked the clock and saw it was 3:05 a.m. Across the room, he saw a TV on a stand. Apparently, in his blacked-out state, he had wheeled a TV/VCR from the conference room into his office. He didn’t remember doing it. It now sat unilluminated in the corner of the room. His fairly large office had a small couch and two chairs on the other side of the desk. Two huge glass windows were on the opposing walls, showing the fluorescent lights from other offices across the street and neon lights from the restaurants below. The curtains on the windows were drawn aside with a sash. Michael sat drinking and thinking about how odd it was that curtains would be hung in a corporate office, as if they were trying to make it like home. As if the place knew that he would need to stay here. Tonight it felt like home, his place. The glass coffee table by the little couch shone with such cleanliness and purpose that he felt even more that yes, this place had been designed for him only.

  Michael looked at the bag of videos. What had he bought? He tried to remember. One was the standard, about girls and a variety of silly sex scenarios. Another one was a sampler of experimental things called Hot Shocks. He really had no idea what he would see on it, just that he hoped it would be weird and entertaining. But he resisted putting the video in. He just continued to sit, hands resting on his legs, gazing at the lights outside his window. If he kept his eyes out of focus, he could only see blurred white streaks or hazy patches of color. He could sit there all night, drinking and half looking. The videos really had no purpose for him, he thought, but they’d be there if he needed them, if the boredom got to be too much.

  For what seemed to him like the millionth time, he went through his daily drill of thinking what his life would be like if he had become an academic. He would have had a smaller house and would probably be unmarried. He would have had students devoted to him. He would have had tenure and the summers off to write, and dinners with his friends who had stayed on and taught. He and Alex would have had their offices next door to each other, and after an afternoon of talking with students in their private offices, they would emerge tired and walk to the campus pub and order hamburgers and beers. Their students would be sitting in booths and would have waved at their favorite professors when Michael and Alex came into the bar.

  He thought back to that rainy night in college when he and Alex had run from the library, a little after midnight, and stopped in Alex’s dorm room to dry off. His own dorm room was farther away and the rain was coming down hard, so Alex’s room was the logical place to go to. Earlier in the night, they had each worked on an essay, as the water had pounded the tall stained-glass walls of the beautiful old library. It being a Saturday night, the library had been almost completely empty, and the campus, too, was strangely vacant. It appeared that the world of other people had retreated completely out of view due to the rain. In Alex’s single dorm room, they had taken off their shirts and pants, leaving on their underwear, and wrapped towels around their chests. Michael had sprawled out on the floor of the room after Alex threw him a pillow from the bed. The heater was on full blast, and both men had realized how tired they were.

  Alex had been different from his usual self and surprised Michael by producing a small bottle of bourbon. He had poured two small glasses and handed one to Michael, smiling. With Alex lying on his bed and Michael on the carpet with a pillow, with only the small lamp on in the corner of the room, the two had talked about their families and finally drifted to sleep, listening to the rain. He could feel the heat from the radiator warming him.

  Suddenly it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t too late to get his PhD—maybe he could still do it even though he was in his forties. But he could not imagine such a thing, could not imagine returning to grad school and sitting in the classes with young people. He saw it as too much like an admission of failure, his tail between his legs. He wouldn’t try to follow another course.

  Michael popped in the video of the girls and watched the plots with attempted glee. If he was going to misbehave, he better try and enjoy it. The second one was even an office seduction that tickled him. But twenty minutes into it, as he sat Indian-style on the carpet gazing up at the screen, he could not watch anymore. The girls in the video
, probably all eighteen years old or so, reminded him too much of his daughter. There was a certain look in their eyes that Ryan had—a stunned kind of look, an unsure kind of invitation, vacant heated anger. He found it disgusting for a man of his age to watch such young women. It was sick, and luckily he discovered he did not get any pleasure from seeing girls in naked vulnerable positions. In fact, the sexual acts made his stomach turn. He was a father now, and this kind of nonsense was something he had outgrown. He put in Hot Shocks and made himself another drink. The men were really going at it. The penetration between the men seemed deeper somehow.

  He had never gotten sex right. It was never right no matter whom he was with. He had been with one other woman in college before Nancy. Beth had been in his philosophy class, and he had taken her back to his dorm room one night after she had flirted with him all throughout the course of a party. From what he could remember of the night, he thought it had gone pretty well. Beth had seemed satisfied, and she had left the next day smiling with the assurance that they were an item. In class, Michael had given her cold looks. He had wanted to be the one to decide who would be his girlfriend—he didn’t want the decision thrust upon him. At first Beth had been shocked, but soon she got the hint and didn’t look his way anymore. He didn’t like the way she dressed anyway—her printed skirts were too bright and cheery, and she was keen on wearing pastel sweaters that were the exact color of the flowers on her skirt.

  * * *

  He switched off the movie and lay back on the carpet. An intense hunger stormed in his stomach. That relieved him, as it told him what the next activity would be. He would go out to an all-night diner and get some food—something greasy and thick. He could do greasy because he was so thin. No matter what he ate, none of it ever stayed on his bones. It all disintegrated. He was the only person he knew in his forties who could eat whatever he wanted and not suffer any noticeable changes in his weight. Nothing would absorb, nothing would settle. Yet his body displeased him.

  Michael stumbled to his feet and looked around the room. What if someone came in? That was hardly likely. He stashed the movies and the bottle in a drawer and left the room. He was still drunk, but he found that if he pulled it together for a few moments, he could pass for sober if he encountered another person. He walked to an all-night diner he knew of that was four blocks away.

  * * *

  Once at the diner, he sat with his eggs and fries and thought about the Peninsula. It was just waiting there forty miles away. It was a chilly night, which meant the Peninsula would be covered in fog at its desolate tip. Michael got the distinct sensation of what it would be like for him to live there alone. He felt what it would be like to be an unconnected man, like those writers who lived alone in large homes far out on the Peninsula. He could have that life—a life of no connections. It was a thrilling idea: to be a person of intrigue, a recluse, a social anomaly. Then he would not have to see his wife in their home, always waiting for something, always primed for some experience that was never going to happen.

  This diner served alcohol, too, and the waitress happily brought him a hot toddy. Michael cupped the warm mug in his hands and thought of Alex, his softness, his intelligent eyes. He thought of the many nights the two of them had stayed at the college library in the big reading room, studying until they were the only ones left in the room, and they would laugh and look around themselves and finally go home. They knew they possessed a kind of dedication that none of their classmates had, a diligence that produced success, a delirious kind of pledge to their work that made them stand out. Alex always made coffee runs for the two of them and would place Michael’s cup next to him wordlessly and expect no thanks. Those moments were Michael’s favorite—the lack of ceremony, the respect for silence that Alex had was precious to him. Such a simple thing, yet it meant everything to him.

  To be able to sit with another person and not to have to talk was the most priceless thing in the world. He had never met another person like Alex in his entire life, and he probably never would. He had never told Alex about his mental problems, but he could tell he knew. Alex saw him for who he was and accepted him—there was no need to explain anything.

  And to think if during junior year he had just stayed in and studied that night as Alex had wanted to instead of dragging him to that party, Meg never would have come into their lives. When he had seen the two of them together for the first time, he had assumed it must be a silly fling, but somehow it just kept lasting and lasting. Michael had made cracks about her, for she was a mousy, loudmouthed little thing, and Alex had stormed out on him one night, making his one and only angry remark: “You are so hateful!”

  Those four little words had stung, and they had made an impression on Michael’s heart. After that night, a clear division had been made. They were still friends, but Meg had won. She had Alex for life from then on. That such an elegant, brilliant man could devote his life to such a mediocre little twig of a woman was something Michael would never understand. He would go to his grave not understanding, he was sure of it. Michael hoped he would outlive her and would someday be able to see her bones reduced to a pile of ash. Her laugh, her drawl, her half-hidden racial prejudices, her lack of intelligence, and her fixation on the silly details of life—all of those qualities were the most infuriating combination in one person.

  Michael had once had the distinct displeasure of overhearing the two of them having sex. He had been standing outside Alex’s dorm room, and he could hear the muffled sounds through the door. He stood and listened to the giggling and the shifting, and her high-pitched battle cries. That was not the worst of it. The worst was when Alex came—his moan was long and solemn. It was horrific for Michael to imagine that the moan was dedicated to this creature gripping her claws into his back.

  Sex seemed the biggest joke in that it formed someone’s entire life, sculpted the direction a life took. That those two polar opposites were joined as one was the biggest joke Michael had ever encountered in his life, worse than Nancy and him. He and Nancy were neutral, he felt—that was all. They canceled each other out and stood for nothing. Michael had had to stand to the right of Alex at his wedding as a groomsman, while the hideous Meg, sheathed in white, bejeweled in diamonds, grinned at her good fortune, this beautiful man who was pledging his eternal love to her. In the wedding photos Michael had looked sullen, to the point where Alex had made a comment about it, passed off as a joke and yet with a serious edge, when he and Meg got the prints back.

  “You couldn’t have sloughed off your melancholy ways for one day?”

  “No, Alex, I couldn’t,” he shot back, and seriousness was permanently inserted into their friendship, as if with a syringe. The comment hurt because it was true—Michael could not do that one simple thing for his friend.

  A few construction workers entered the diner as day approached—he would have to leave soon. He was still drunk, but the food had grounded him a bit. He studied one of the men who sat at the counter in his workmen boots with large, speckled hands. His gold wedding band flashed on the dusty hand, and Michael imagined that the man must have a loving wife and two daughters, all of whom thought of him as their hero.

  Was there a way to fix all this with his family? He had indeed done what Ryan had accused him of. He had bitten her. He could hardly remember doing it, so when she had accused him, he had denied it. She had seemed to want him to admit to it. The problem was that in sobriety, it never seemed as though it had actually happened and so he never owned up to it. But in his drunken state, he could remember leaning over and placing his teeth gently on her neck. In that moment, he had been so relaxed that he was starting to fall asleep and did not remember who was before him or where he was. In a sober state, the memory seemed to vanish. She had stood before him, such a miraculous creation, that he felt he had to connect himself to her, and that had been his way. He was helpless to understand himself, that one decision, to take two of his pills and continue to dr
ink, had caused him to do that bizarre thing and so to become a monster in his daughter’s eyes. If he had chosen not to make another drink and take only one pill, his horrendous and baffling behavior would not have arisen in him and he would have remained a normal father, perhaps.

  * * *

  With the sun coming up, Michael knew he had to go back to his house. He wondered if John had spent the night. He walked back to his office from the diner. He locked the videos in a file cabinet, quickly tidied up the room, wheeled the TV/VCR into the hallway, turned out the lights, and locked his office door behind him. Downstairs, the security guard was asleep in his chair, so Michael easily slipped out and into the dawn.

  He drove back in the half-light, swerving onto the shoulder every hundred feet or so. There weren’t too many cars on the road on a Sunday morning at five a.m. He passed a few all-night diners and their lights were comforting, the rows and rows of empty booths lit up, waiting. He breezed through Orin, where the traffic lights were all switched to blinking yellow and blinking red.

  When Michael walked through the side door, he saw that cookies had been left out on the counter for him, under a layer of plastic wrap. He paused in the living room by the stairs and checked the couch. There was no one asleep there. He then crept up to his bedroom and soundlessly opened the door a foot. Nancy was curled up on her side of the bed. His space was empty, as if, even when she was unconscious and he absent, her body wouldn’t dare move onto his side of the bed because she knew his place was not her place.