But mostly she treated me with a tender remove, as if I were a terminal patient whose condition she regretted but had long since accepted with sympathy and peace. I haven’t been able to fool myself that giving up on that intimacy with me did not cost her anything, though. Ten years later she was diagnosed with the cancer a yearning for children had once helped us skirt, and in her last weeks, our house filled with the people who loved her. Elliot and Gina slept together in the attic in his narrow bed, and Liz’s sisters and mother took rooms at the Marriott in Rancho Cordova. Trish had just found out her husband was having an affair, and she slept on the couch in the living room next to the hospital bed we’d rented from Hospice and talked to Liz, whenever she woke, about what a painful combination fury and nostalgic longing proved to be. I was glad they’d all come, especially Trish, whose needs seemed to move Liz past her own suffering, but as I sensed the last day coming I wanted very badly to be alone with my wife.
One night while Trish slept, I carried Liz outside and laid her on the chaise next to the unused hot tub beneath the stars. She still looked so beautiful. She had lost her hair, but she was wearing a red wig she had chosen from a catalog and pinned with silk daisies to amuse her unhappy sister, and against the bodice of her nightgown lay a necklace of painted macaroni Elliot had made as a child.
She raised her arms up behind her red hair and crossed her thin legs. “Skinny-dipping?” she said.
I laughed.
“Or maybe just a little nooky?”
I started to cry.
“No…” she said softly. She took my hand. “Shhh.”
I closed my eyes, but I could not stop. She rubbed my knuckles with her thumb.
“What is it?” she said.
“I was remembering what you said about Trish after that fund-raiser in San Francisco. That she lived such an important life. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“And here she is now, getting help from you while you’re dying.”
She shrugged, but I could see that her lip was trembling.
I said, “It’s you who’s important,” I said.
She shook her head.
I said, “Everyone comes to you. You help everyone you touch.”
She shook her head again. She was crying now too, but quietly, and I knew with bitter clarity why. I tried to make it funny, although I knew it wasn’t: “Even me,” I said.
Her whole body shook at this.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you did. You helped as much as anyone could have.”
She covered her eyes with her thin hand.
I said, “You’re the most important person I know.”
But days later she was gone, and then there was a funeral, and a dinner, and the emptying of my house of needs and noise, and going over that conversation in dark rooms at night, revising it, straining for words I might have found to persuade her of her worth, it is then that it became clear to me that the chance I’d missed had really come years ago.
The first Sunday of that summer vacation, Elliot asked me to meet him in the field behind our house—the acre of scrub brush that separated our yard from the Fair Oaks Power Plant. When he approached, he was carrying a box, and his stray dog followed closely, her leash dragging and catching at times in the weeds. On the last day of school, he had found her on the shoulder of the frontage road with a bad cut on her leg. In her panic, she tore up the backseat of his new car on the way to the clinic, and then turned on a veterinary aide, but instead of taking her to the ASPCA, he had purchased a full round of shots, a forty-pound bag of kibble, and a big plastic dome called a Dogloo. At night, when she wasn’t asleep inside it, she crept as close to the house as her tether allowed and barked until he opened his window and called softly to her. Not long after her arrival, I noticed three fine furrows of dried blood on his forearm. Still, he checked out a book on dog training at the library and spent hours with her each day in our yard.
He set the box down, and the stray sniffed between my legs.
“Down,” Elliot said calmly, and to my surprise, she dropped to the dry grass, her nose resting on my shoe.
“Wow,” I said.
“It’s amazing what they can learn,” he said.
“No kidding.”
“They want to be part of a group with rules.”
“Pack animals.”
“Right.”
He was spreading out a blanket on the rough stubble of weeds. He gestured for me to sit, and I did.
He said, “I can’t stay very long.”
“Okay.”
He pulled back the flaps of the box. “Tim’s dad is taking us to a monster truck race before work.” I had finally floated the idea of spending the summer expanding the garage, but in the end he and Tim had found jobs together at the McDonald’s in Arden Fair Mall.
The dog stretched and pressed a paw into my thigh, and I started.
“No,” Elliot said, and the dog retracted.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Maybe I should—”
“Relax, Dad. I’m just training her.” He pulled the box towards him over the blanket. “Ham or tuna?”
“Tuna,” I said.
Then he opened the box and withdrew two sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, a red apple, a bruised Bartlett pear, and two cans of root beer.
He also took out his plumbing notebook, a torque wrench, and my father’s gun.
“Bon appétit,” he said, and he reached for his sandwich.
In going over this ground in memory in the last twenty years, I have been able to isolate two separate and distinct areas of regret. First is that although the sight of a gun in my son’s hands ignited a quick flare of panic, it was quickly extinguished by the memory that I owned no bullets and replaced by a familiar and infuriating certainty that he was simply testing me once again. It did not even occur to me to worry that he might have purchased a box himself, and given the willingness to take reckless action to torment me that he’d displayed in the last six months, this seems almost incredible. Second is that when faced with the audacious bluntness of this final provocation, I did not just finally break down and ask him why the hell he was so angry with me. But by then he had me so well conditioned to the fire-drill rigors of recognizing and responding to his challenges that hiding my emotion at another was almost a reflex. At that point, as desirable as it would have been for both of us, I’m not sure it was even possible for him to break me.
I picked up my sandwich and unwrapped it carefully, raised half of it in a sort of lame toast, and took a bite.
He laughed bitterly, his tongue dotted with pink bits of ham. “You’re not even sweating.”
“It’s not very hot out,” I said.
“Weird things to bring to a picnic, eh?”
“A little unusual.”
“Nice wrench, don’t you think?”
“I’ve always liked it.”
“Feel like reading some of my notes?”
“If you want me to.”
“Where’d you get the gun?”
“It was my father’s.”
His sandwich was limp in his hand. A bit of ham escaped it and fell on the blanket. The dog snapped for it, her long tongue lashing out.
Elliot said, “That’s all you’re going to say about it, isn’t it?”
“Unless you have more questions.”
“You don’t want to ask me anything yourself?”
“No.”
“Not even about the wrench?” he said.
How can I explain it? I thought he was simply giving me one more opportunity to fail him with my anger, instead of the last to win.
I said, “I trust that you tell me what you want me to know.”
He looked at me for a moment, and then he turned to his dog and held his sandwich at arm’s length. She took the whole of it in her dexterous mouth and watched us as she chewed. Then she swallowed and dropped a slice of sweet pickle from between her
lips, whole. Elliot started putting things back in the box, first the wrench, then the plumbing notebook, and finally the gun. He closed its cardboard flaps, touched the dog on the head, and they walked off towards our house together. He didn’t say good-bye, and for reasons I can’t understand, I didn’t say it either. I was watching him go, and this preoccupied me so that I was more like another person observing myself watching my son depart. Elliot held his head upright, but in a way that he had that suggested disappointment. I had studied it before. Maybe his shoulders sloped more than those of other boys. Or it was the elongation of the neck; it made his head look like a burden to support. He crossed the fiery line where the sand-colored scrub brush met our malachite lawn, and then passed through a small opening in our hedge and disappeared from view until I could see him over its top, trudging towards the elm on the high ground in our yard to tie his dog. He kneeled and kissed her on the bridge of the nose, which she bowed for like a pauper being knighted. He held her dark nose to his forehead. The dog was still. It was as if she knew how she had been blessed to be the recipient of my son’s least guarded advances, and, ridiculous as it was, I felt a quick jealousy. The kiss lasted no more than a second, and the feeling passed almost as quickly, like a match blown out. Then my son stood, picked up his box of questions, and walked into my house.
I was left sitting on the blanket, and for a moment, I pretended it was thoughtful—his leaving it for me—but I knew he had intended no consolations. It was hot, and the sun drew last night’s rain from the dry yellow stalks, making them smell green. The power lines to my right and left crackled with electricity. My plot had been priced well below market for the area because no developer could conceive of a design that would avoid views of these transformers without sacrificing so much natural light that no buyer in the Fair Oaks market would want to live in it, but I’d designed a two-story L-shaped ranch with two skylit wings facing southeast, and no windows at all along the southwestern wall. To the tricks of architecture, I had added the screening of a thick row of Leyland cypress, which I now had to stand on a ladder to trim. But still, if you stood at the edge of the yard, you could hear the humming.
When I finally came back to the kitchen, Liz was calling out to me from the basement. I found her at the base of the wooden steps standing on a steamer trunk, flashlight in hand, peering through a hinged door in the beam I’d built to enclose the soil pipe. The plasterboard above her was darkened and dripping, and her hair was damp with sewer water. As she pushed it aside to see me, she paused to steady her voice. “I’ve been trying to fix it myself, but I can’t find the key.”
“What key?”
“The key to the mechanical closet. To switch off the main.”
I reached above the doorsill then, but the key was not there. I ran the length of it with my fingers. Dust. A patch of wood I might have sanded more. I tried the knob, but unfortunately he had not forgotten to relock it.
I stepped onto the trunk next to Liz. When I built the house, I had joined each length of drainage pipe with a neoprene sleeve and a stainless steel shield I tightened to sixty inch-pounds with a torque wrench. What I saw when I looked inside the hatch was a welt of water leaking out both ends of the sleeve. The screw clamps had been loosened so much that the edges of the shield didn’t even touch. Drainpipes are empty until plumbing is used; to get this volume of water to leak from the pipe, he would have had to run a tap for a very long time. Liz was quiet next to me, and it was her hair as much as the pipe itself that smelled of sewer water now. Oddly enough, I think it was this, finally, that moved me to rage.
As I climbed the stairs, I took two at a time. The door to his bathroom was closed, and I could hear the water running. I could not think of words I would say because I was both bewildered and angry. I could imagine only holding both shoulders firmly as I did when he swung his young body out over our roof. Maybe I would lose my will. Maybe I’d make another sound he would mock. I banged on the center of the door with my fist, but inside the bathroom the water didn’t stop, and it was only then—remarkably, finally—that I thought how easily he could have purchased bullets for my father’s gun.
I’m not sure I can even characterize the feeling I had at that moment. It has invaded a handful of my dreams in recent years, and the loneliness of waking up a widower, my son a five-hour plane flight away with a wife who knows him better than I ever have, is such a comfort by comparison that I am briefly grateful to wander around the house in the dark and visit all those things that haunt me by day: photographs, empty dresser drawers, a full-sized kitchen. It was the feeling that if I could take back all the years of joy, all his smiles and shy looks of pride, snatch them back and have lived an immeasurably smaller life of television watched alone and risks avoided inside a small apartment, I would have done so without hesitation; not to spare my son his adolescent anguish—it was much weaker and more selfish than this—but to spare myself the life that would begin when I looked at the scene he had left for me on the other side of his bathroom door.
For a moment, things got very slow. Steam seeped out beneath the door. The grandfather clock below me tolled. I did not go for a screwdriver to remove the knob, as I might have. I rammed my shoulder against the door, so hard that for the next week I could not raise my arm to take a cup from the kitchen cupboard or shave my face without pain, and as I leaned back to do it again, the water stopped. There was a sound of wet feet slapping the tile and a towel pulled from the bar. He opened the door and stood there dripping water. Steam kissed my face. “What?” he said.
He was leaning towards me, his face red with heat and righteous anger. Water dripped from his nose and ears onto his clavicle.
“What is it?” he said.
Sometimes I look back on this day, and I think, What mysteries are so many of a human being’s most important choices?—mongrels of a hasty copulation between body and soul. I was so full of things at that moment—bloodrush, fury, sweat, habit, adrenaline, confusion, shame, and, maybe most potent of all, the invisible misfires and wire-pulls of memory—that despite the pain of an unbearably complex fullness, almost a bursting, I cannot say I had any clear thoughts at all. There was just a tidal swell of mind-noise and corporal discomfort through which my indescribable relief that my son was alive passed quickly into something else.
“I know what you did,” I said.
“It’s not the first time.”
“I know.”
He stood, dripping. Despite months of work with those weights, his bare chest looked small.
“I forgive you,” I said.
“I did them all.”
“I know that.”
“Even the clog. Even the trap seals.”
“I know.”
His glasses clouded over with steam. Although he was half-naked and sixteen, it occurred to me that he might not believe me without a larger gesture, and without hesitation, I rested a hand on his bare shoulder. He looked at me, waiting, and my strong impression is that at that moment he still had enough hope to believe that I might summon the insight and courage to stop short and call a halt to it—that instead of reaching up my sleeve for another ace from a conjurer’s deck of bland emotions, I might, finally, for once in my life, say something completely honest. A breeze stirred the papers in the attic behind me and made paper noises. They settled. But then I saw that key on the counter next to his sink, and in the wake of my horror at having made room for mortal danger in his life, the sight of this went straight to simple reflex. I took my hand from his shoulder as if from a hot stove and picked up the key. He studied my face after this withdrawal with something like the mixture of contempt and longing Liz had displayed in the radiologist’s office. Then he took off his cloudy glasses. He rubbed his eyes. I’m sure now that this was a prelude to tears I should have stayed to witness, but before they came, I had turned for the stairs to hide my own.
It would take a long time for me to realize that his tests of me were really over. In the years to come, at those mom
ents when I expected an upwelling of disappointment might move him to words of judgment, he would offer only those gentle physical gestures of respect and affection that in time seemed the saddest condemnation of all. At his college graduation he would shake my hand, in Liz’s hospital room he would hold it, and when the band stopped playing at his wedding reception, he would lead me alone to my car.
When I got back to the basement, the pipe had already stopped dripping. Liz had gone upstairs to change her clothes and rinse her hair—in the bathroom later I’d find an empty bottle from the liter of club soda she’d used so she wouldn’t have to run the taps—and I took the opportunity afforded by my privacy and enlightenment to open the door to the mechanical closet to make sure that Elliot had not kept the gun. The tin had the right heft, but I knew better than to trust this. I took it out of the wall and opened it to make sure, and looked inside the empty chamber. Then I put it back, and when I locked the maintenance door, I pocketed the key.
After I finished retightening the seam on the soil pipe, I found Liz in the kitchen, cutting cookies shaped like stars and moons.
“Sorry about the mess you stumbled on,” I said.
She waved away my apology with her free hand. “Will it be hard to fix?”
“Just a little Sheetrock patching,” I said.
I reached out for the bowl of cookie dough, and she passed me a scrap between her fingers. It seemed to me a foregone conclusion at this point that she wouldn’t ask me about the banging she’d heard when I tried to break down Elliot’s door—she’d ask Elliot instead—and although a year ago she would have, it did not occur to me that if I didn’t bring it up myself, we would never go back to that place. Outside, Elliot’s dog began barking. I heard Elliot’s window slide open, and the soothing tones of his voice, although I could not make out his words. Liz heard him too; I could tell from the way her eyes glanced at the ceiling and her shoulders relaxed. Something about it. I said, “Last month I came across a help-wanted section in the paper you had marked up with a pen.”
The Testing of Luther Albright Page 24