by Lily King
“This town is so cute! I’m not sure I ever knew it was on the water, I mean right on the water. I always pictured it so gloomy and sinister. And this house is enormous. It’s like a B & B.”
Her father comes up the walkway, tucking in the back of his shirt. “I’m starting to understand why even Berkeley might have paled in comparison.” He kisses me on the cheek.
“It wasn’t really a choice of geography, per se.” I hear the sudden peevishness in my voice and soften it. “Thank you for making the detour for me.”
“Hardly a detour. You were always part of the plan,” he says.
I haven’t seen Julie’s father in a couple of years. He looks the same, a medium-sized man with a full head of silver hair he wears cropped square, a grown-out buzz cut. I wonder if he remembers the diamond-in-the-rough comment and what he will say after this visit. There’s always the expectation on Julie’s part that we will get along instantly. But it has always hurt a little to be around them.
My father comes out on the porch. I lead them up to meet him.
“You found us,” he says, and puts out his hand. “Gardiner Amory.”
“Alex Kellerman.”
There’s always tremendous subtext when two men of their generation shake hands. It’s always a power grab. I watch my father accentuate his height advantage while Alex stands with his thick legs too far apart, as if he might need to crouch and spring.
“And this is Julie, Dad.”
My father’s shoulders soften and he bends his elbow as he takes her hand. “Great to meet you. I know Daley misses you a lot. Her housemate now isn’t much fun.”
I’ve never in my adult life introduced my father to anyone.
Alex peers in the house. He wants to have a look around, as I would in his place. But I only have a few hours with Julie and do not want to spend it in the New England WASP Museum. I suggest a walk on the beach and then lunch in town. Alex asks if he could use the restroom.
I walk him through the pantry and dining room to the bathroom off the den.
“The light’s a little tricky,” I say, punching the round black cylinder hard.
“Whoa,” he says, noticing the team photographs. At the feet of the boys in the front row was always the same black board with white letters and numbers identifying the team and the date. 1940–1949 were the years accounted for at St. Paul’s, and I knew that wouldn’t slip Julie’s father’s notice. Two great-uncles of Julie’s had died at Treblinka while my father was at a fancy boarding school.
“Which one is your dad?” he asks, tapping the glass of the Football Thirds, 1941.
I put my finger on the smallest boy in front, looking warily ahead but not at the camera.
“He looks scared, doesn’t he? Imagine having been shipped away from your mother at such a young age. Hey, here he looks about twelve and already on varsity,” he says, tapping another picture.
“He was always good at tennis.”
“He’s half the size of his teammates.”
“He was really small, and then he shot up. Look.” I point to a photograph on the other side of the bathroom, near the sink. In it my father is on the far right, his hair darker and his face much narrower, holding one of the oars, the tallest man on the team. He looks as if he has better things to do than stand around having his photograph taken by some moron.
“It’s a real slice of history, isn’t it?” he says.
“One privileged sliver of it, I suppose.” All the St. Paul’s boys stare at me, fresh cut grass on their cleats. Then I remember Alex wants to go to the bathroom and I quickly leave him to it.
On the porch, my father and Julie seem to be talking about pool vacuums. He’s making an effort with her. He’s facing her directly, not looking off somewhere like he often does with people, and bending toward her to make sure he hears her response. He asks if she’s made some friends in Albuquerque yet, and she says she thought in a warmer climate people would be more approachable, but the people in her apartment building are always rushing downstairs with mountain bikes on their shoulders, no time to chat.
“You’ll have to get yourself a mountain bike, I guess,” my father says.
“Yup. Right about when hell freezes over.”
My father laughs. Julie, I see now, is the kind of woman my father would call a real pistol.
We get in their rental car, the men in front.
“So here we are with our fathers,” I say quietly.
“Just another regular day,” Julie says.
We look at the backs of their heads and laugh.
I point out the Vance sisters’ driveway.
“The ones who called each other mother and father,” Julie says, as if it’s from a book she read a long time ago.
I show her Mallory’s parents’ house, and then, quietly, Patrick’s old house. The beach lot is full so we park in the driveway of a summer house that has been empty for years. All the green shutters have been pulled closed.
“It’s like the Ramsays’ house,” Alex says, getting out of the car.
“‘Will you fade?’” Julie says. “‘Will you perish?’”
“‘We remain!’” Alex bellows.
My father flashes me a look: They’re not playing with a full deck, are they?
The ocean is across the street, booming with waves. Alex stops before stepping onto the sand. “Magnificent.”
Julie and I take off our sandals and let the fathers go ahead of us.
“So who’s the guy with the mountain bike?” I ask.
“What?”
“The guy who won’t talk to you.”
She crosses her arms. The wind is blowing her short hair into a short funnel. “Damn. How’d you know?”
“I’ve never heard you complain about people not being approachable.” Julie could make friends with a barnacle.
“He lives in the apartment above me. Alone. But I haven’t been able to speak to him.”
“What?”
“I know, it’s weird. I just get all—bashful.”
I laugh into the wind. “We need to track this. This is a first. He’s bringing out your tortoise side.”
“It’s so good to see you.” She slips her arm through mine, and I squeeze her to me. “I’m trying to get a sense of your days here.”
“My father marked his ninetieth day in AA two weeks ago. It’s a big deal.”
“I was talking about your days,” she says, but the men have stopped to wait for us so I don’t have to answer. What could I tell her? That in three and half months I’d written less than three pages of a nonacademic article?
“I love the proportions of this beach.”
“The proportions, Pop?”
He shrugs. He likes to be teased by her. “Some beaches are too long and skinny, some you have to walk a mile to the water. This one is just right.”
“The Platonic ideal of beach?”
“Exactly. And see that island out there, slightly off center? There always has to be something asymmetrical within the concept of perfection. Like Julie’s nose.”
“Daddy!” she says, covering it. It bends slightly to the right.
He wraps his arm around her and kisses her on the forehead. “Asymmetrical perfection, my love. Nothing more, nothing less.”
My father and I walk back to the car behind them.
“Nice guy,” my father says. “Did you know he was a shrink?”
“I did.”
“He told me a story about a guy who came to see him for a few years. Passionate fly fisherman. He’d bring his box of flies to every appointment, and that’s what they’d do: go through each fly, what it caught, what time of the year you could use it. The guy can’t ever say why he’s there, can’t answer that question. Two years go by, and one day the guy holds up a fly and says, ‘This is the fly my son tied the day before he died.’ Christ, that’s a story, isn’t it?”
At lunch we all order lobsters, except my father, who ribs Alex for wearing his bib.
�
��This is a decent shirt,” Alex says.
“I just hope we don’t see anyone I know.”
“You can tell them I’m your retarded cousin from Akron.”
“Daddy!”
“Excuse me, Jules. So how’d you end up here in Ashing, Gardiner?”
“My wife told me we were moving out of Boston, and the next thing I knew the vans were at the door.”
Alex laughs. “It’s like that with women, isn’t it? They know what they want.”
“And what they don’t want,” my father says, looking down at his paper plate.
I ask whom they’re visiting in Maine, and Alex tells us about his friend from med school who has set up clinics in war-torn areas. They’re lucky to be catching him in the country. He describes his own visit to the clinic in Guatemala and the experience of using a translator for therapy, how he was able to be much more aware of the person’s emotions as they were speaking to him because of the delay in meaning. Julie and I have many questions for him, about the conditions and the civil war, and his answers just stir up more questions. My father eats his hot dogs and nods and says, “Is that right?” several times, but he’s not listening. He has a hard time relaxing. His leg jiggles continuously beside me. He’s like a boy in school waiting for the bell to ring, or, if you look closely, like an animal who’s not certain there’s not a predator nearby.
After plates are cleared and fingers cleaned with lemon-scented wipes, Alex gets out a small set of watercolor tubes and a small black notebook with thick pages. He looks over my shoulder at the harbor and hastily dabs paint onto a page. My father insists on paying the bill.
He and I sit in the back on the way home to Myrtle Street. The maples along both sides of the road are old and flourishing, impossibly tall, their leaves just starting to turn. My father rubs his thumb on a seam of his pants.
I invite them in, but Alex says they have to be in Wiscasset by five. It’s Julie’s turn to go to the bathroom, so I take her in the house and wait for her in the kitchen while our fathers talk in the yard.
When she comes out she says, “I thought if I came here and saw you it would all make sense, what you decided.”
“And that didn’t happen?”
“That man is doing just fine. You don’t need to be here, Daley.”
“He puts on a good act. And he is getting better. He’s growing.”
“I’m worried you’re waiting for something from him that he can’t ever give you. And if that’s not it, I just hope you understand that your life and your growth is every bit as important as his.”
I can’t bear another parting lecture at the door. “You need to think of me now as a sort of Charlotte Brontë figure, the unmarried daughter of the town vicar.”
“Please don’t say that, even in jest. I don’t know why you’ve thrown everything away.” She looks like she’s about to cry.
“Tell me you wouldn’t drop everything to be with your father if he needed you.”
“He wouldn’t let me.”
“If your father broke his back and couldn’t get out of bed, you’d be right there for him.”
“He wouldn’t let me stay. It would break his heart if I lost something I’d worked for my whole adult life because of him.”
“Your father must have a lot of people he could lean on, but my father has no one but me right now. I’m it.”
“I understand that it’s important to you to believe that.”
“Spare me the therapy-speak. I am fixing something with my father that got destroyed when I was eleven years old. What job title could ever compare to that?”
“I’m not talking about the job, Daley. You can get another job. I’m talking about Jonathan. You two are what all the rest of us are looking for.”
“Don’t idealize us. It was a flawed relationship, obviously, if he couldn’t understand my decision.”
“I can’t understand your decision. No one understands what you’ve done.”
“But you are still speaking to me. Jonathan has disappeared.”
“I think for some reason you’re scared of what you have with Jonathan.”
“He’s gone, Julie. It’s over. Use the past tense.”
“No.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
“You really haven’t heard from him?” My heart is slamming now.
“No.”
I realize I was counting on her to tell me today where he’s gone and how he’s doing. The big fist of pain shifts and forces up a few tears. She puts her arms around me and makes it burn even more. She’s leaving and Jonathan is really gone.
“Let’s make you a plan,” she says softly. “How much longer do you think you’ll stay here?”
“I don’t know how long he’ll need me.”
“Then you’ve got to decide how long you want to be needed.”
Alex calls from the porch. He’s worried about traffic.
“I’ll call you tonight,” she says.
I wipe my eyes and walk her to the car. My father says goodbye, telling them to stop by whenever they’re in the Northeast again. He looks spent. I know he’ll go right up for a nap after they drive away.
I hug them both. Alex hands me a watercolor. It’s not of the harbor as I expected, but of me and Julie with her shorn hair. We’re leaning in, talking. There’s little I recognize in his rendering of me, but he’s captured Julie’s mouth and her perfectly imperfect nose with only a few brushstrokes.
That night, after AA and supper, we watch the Red Sox play Cleveland. My father is pissed at Clemens, pissed at the announcers. He thinks they talk too much. At the seventh-inning stretch, he takes his glass in for more soda. He lets the dogs out and then back in. He returns, and when the players are back on the field, he watches in silence, his breathing heavy. Mo Vaughn makes a double play, and he says, “Now that’s how you do it.” There is something slightly self-satisfied in his voice that makes me turn. He meets my eye, raises his eyebrows slightly. He’s been on his best behavior all day, and he hasn’t said a mocking thing about Julie or her father since they left. But honestly, I don’t know anymore if he is fucking with me.
21
By November, Neal is still my lone friend in Ashing, but I only see him when I go to his shop. The rest of his life is a mystery to me.
“Are you really as reclusive as you seem?” I ask him.
“Pretty much.”
“Were you always?”
“Not so much.” He’s particularly preoccupied today, watching the cars through the door, fidgeting with a pen cap. The skin under his eyes looks bruised. I’m probably not looking so well myself. The cold has brought on doubt and fear. I cannot seem to make a plan. The dead star feeling has taken hold. It makes everything feel struck, as if my whole body is a big bell that won’t stop ringing. I sleep less and less. I roam the house at night. I look for hidden bottles. I am ashamed of my lack of trust in my father, when I always thought the problem between us was his lack of trust in me. I write more fragments in my Jonathan notebook. My heartbeat is too fast and too heavy. What will become of me? At times it seems there is only a paper-thin wall between me and permanent full-blown panic. Neal calms me. If I described how I felt I know he would say he feels that way too.
“I heard you had a drink with Jason Mullens.”
I laugh. “Two months ago.”
“You gonna go out with him again?”
“No.”
“Has he called?”
“He’s left a couple of messages. He keeps calling himself Officer Mullens on the machine. My father must think there’s a warrant out for my arrest.”
Neal pretends to laugh. Then he stands up and says he has to go. He’s going to close the shop for a lunch break.
Two days later I’m in Goodale’s parking lot, loading groceries into the car, when a station wagon pulls up next to me, a bright red French armoire strapped to its roof.
Neal’s mother, who usually drives a Volkswagen Fox
since she gave up the Pinto, leaps out. “Isn’t it just divine?” she says, and hugs me hard. There is an awful stench to her, pungent, animal. “Isn’t it to die for?”
I give the armoire the attention she requires. I stroke its unpainted feet, marvel at its size. I can’t picture such an enormous and loud piece of furniture in their small house on July Street. “Wow,” I say.
“It has about a thousand shelves on the sides. It is crucial to getting things organized chez moi.” There is something extra-intense about the way she is looking at me, as if I am just about to reveal a great secret. She’s got the wrong person. I’ve been cleaning bathrooms all morning. I have very little to impart.
“It’s been the most amazing day. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a day like it, Daley. I discovered something. Something about stockings.”
“Stockings?”
“It’s really a miracle. And no one ever talks about it. I don’t think anyone else knows. You can just piss. Did you know that? You can piss in your pantyhose and it doesn’t leak. It just sort of evaporates. I’ve been doing it all week. Nobody can tell! But I’ve got to get home now. I promised Neal I wouldn’t go out and I did, and now he’s going to be furious with me.” She looks delighted by the idea. “You know he won the Renaissance Cup, don’t you?”
“I do know that.” I smile. “I remind him of that more than he’d like.”
“Oh, he is such a pill, isn’t he? You have no idea until you have a son what they put you through. But they’re better than a husband, that’s for sure. My husband just disappeared. Poof. Gone.”
“Really?”
“He does this on occasion. Huge drama queen. ‘I just can’t abide this and that’ sort of thing. You know that store almost didn’t take my check, for crying out loud. They are a bunch of asses on sticks. Filthy French mongrels.” She looks at me as if I’ve just appeared. “Oh, Daley, it is so good to have you back home.” She pulls me to her again and, now that I know what the smell is, it’s worse. “We need your youth and beauty and inspiration in this tired old town.” She is hollering in my ear. “See?” she says, pulling away, looking at the ground between her feet. “I did it again and nothing came out.”