Fifteen minutes later we were seated at the table, passing around Chinese food cartons. In the midst of it all was our son, clean and chirpy from his bath, his wet hair slicked back so that his ears protruded in a way that was almost unbearably adorable. He was happily chattering away about his day, but when he got to the story of the painted grapes Doris put her chopsticks down and looked accusingly at me.
“What a horrible thing to do. That’s false advertising!”
“No, it isn’t, Doris. The grapes were out of season. They just needed a little sprucing up.”
“It seems very wrong to me.”
You’d have thought that the paint job was my idea. Jake looked from his mother to me. His ears seemed to be trembling. I struggled to remain calm.
“Doris,” I said, “they aren’t advertising the grapes, they’re advertising the juice.”
“Nonetheless, it’s a canard.”
“Ooh, a canard. Is that the big word of the night? Let me look it up so I can think of something snappy to say.”
“You needn’t look it up, it simply means—”
Every Chinese food carton jumped as Jake’s small fist slammed down on the table.
We looked at him in shock. His lips were quivering, and his eyes were blurred with tears of fury.
“Can’t you two ever stop fighting?”
It was a question, a plea, a cry for decency. Doris and I looked at each other, two reasonably intelligent people who’d greatly underestimated the perceptivity of this human being we’d come together to create. What a strategy we’d lived by. Feed him, clothe him, send him to school, keep him busy, and he’ll never detect the underlying tension in this home, will he?
Not much he wouldn’t. And even if he weren’t a bright boy, he would have known. Kids detect marital misery through their skins, not their brains, the way animals know when to run from an earthquake before the seismograph even detects the tremors.
But when you’re a five-year-old boy living in the midst of marital turmoil, there’s no place to run. All you can do is sit there in your Spider-Man pajamas and listen to your parents go after each other in an argument over a bowl of painted grapes that has absolutely nothing to do with a bowl of painted grapes.
The sudden silence was excruciating. Jake’s words struck like meteors, and it’s as if Doris and I were waiting for the dust cloud to settle, but that could take years, so I blustered my way through the dust, flying blind as I said, “We’re just having a little disagreement, Jake.”
He gave me a withering look. “Bullshit,” he replied, and it was the first time we’d ever heard him use a vulgar word.
Doris gasped as if she’d just been knifed in the chest. “That was uncalled for, Jacob!”
He ignored her. “It’s not just a little disagreement. You guys fight all the time.”
“Not all the time,” I said, but there was no strength in my words, none at all. I was just throwing them up the way an overmatched boxer throws up his arms to block a barrage of punches.
But there were no more punches. Jake’s attack was over. The anger was gone from his tears. Now his eyes were wet with sorrow and his face was pale. Smudges of that rosy makeup stood out on Jake’s white cheeks. It took a lot of washing to get them off, and Jake had failed to do it in the bath. He looked like a heartbroken clown.
Shouldn’t one of us have gotten up to hug the boy? Doris and I just sat there, staring down at our plates. We had been outed. The fraud of our lives was no longer a secret. Jake understood the situation, maybe even better than Doris and I understood it. His childhood had just come to an abrupt end on that miserable winter night, and even Chinese food couldn’t fix that.
He didn’t want the rest of his chicken lo mein and pork fried dumplings. He picked up his plate and set it on the floor, where the cats appeared out of nowhere to devour the food.
This was strictly forbidden by Doris, but she realized this was not a night to enforce the house rules. If Jake were to have pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his pajama pocket and lit up, Doris probably wouldn’t have objected.
Me, I’d have asked him to give me a cigarette. And a blindfold. For the first time in my life I actually wished I were dead, and even that wouldn’t have been quite enough. Lousy as I’d been as a husband and a father, my death would have traumatized Jake and made things worse for Doris.
No, I didn’t wish that I were dead. What I wished was that I’d never been born.
But I was, and so was Doris, and somehow we got together and because of that Jake was born, this sweet, bright five-year-old who got up from the table to kiss first his father and then his mother on the cheek, politely, like a child from an upper-class British family bidding his parents good night before the governess takes him up to bed. Doris tried to hug him, but he kept his arms tight to his sides and tensed up, like someone trying to break a wrestling hold. He took a few steps toward his room and then whirled around to face us, like a gunslinger expecting an ambush.
“You’re going to get a divorce, aren’t you?”
There was no place to run, no place to hide, no place to die. I tried to speak, but my words, whatever they might have been, perished in my throat. Doris wasn’t doing much better. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, squeezed the bridge of her nose, and put the glasses back on before speaking just one word:
“Eventually.”
What a way to put it. Yes, my boy, your parents’ marriage is a dead thing, but there’s no rush to bury it. The divorce is just something we’ll get around to, like new carpeting in your room.
I was ready for Jake to throw a tantrum, burst out crying, but he didn’t. This was no shock to him. He’d absorbed the shock of it bit by bit over the years, all on his own, piecing together the all too obvious puzzle of his parents’ collapsed marriage (collapsed? Had the structure actually ever stood in the first place?) without letting on to either of us. This is something unhappily married parents just don’t get. They’re not the only ones keeping up a facade. The kids do it, too, and it’s absolutely exhausting.
No wonder Jake looked tired. His eyes seemed as flat and cold as the eyes of a shark. No light. No hope. Nothing.
“I’m going to bed now,” he said to both of us, or maybe to neither of us.
“We’ll tuck you in,” I said.
Jake chuckled, and he was right. What a ridiculous offer, like offering a Band-Aid to a man whose throat has been slashed. He held up a hand to keep us both at bay. “I’ll tuck myself in,” he said, turning to go once again.
Suddenly, he turned to face us one more time, arms folded across his chest. He looked like the world’s youngest lawyer.
“You guys,” he said, “are like the grapes.”
Doris looked at him in wonder. “Baby?”
“Your marriage,” Jake said, almost impatiently. “It’s like the grapes. Just a paint job.”
He went straight to bed.
I really don’t know why I didn’t die that night. Doris and I couldn’t even talk about it. We cleared away the food and went to Jake’s room to find him sound asleep, stretched out on his back as if he were on a beach somewhere. He wasn’t faking sleep. He was dead to the world. He’d just put down the burden he’d been carrying for so long, and now at last it was time to rest. There were heartaches and traumas to come, but not tonight. Tonight there was only the oblivion of sleep.
But not for his parents. I went to bed with Doris for the very last time that night. We lay on opposite edges of the bed like castaway enemies forced to share a life raft, sighing and crying over this monumental mess.
Toward dawn Doris passed out, but I didn’t, and at first light I moved to the couch. I didn’t want Jake to catch me in bed with his mother. On top of everything else that had happened, the last thing he needed was false hope.
There was remarkably little to say about it in the weeks that followed—Jake had pretty much said it all that night. He’d actually accelerated the divorce process. Doris and I probably would
have stewed and simmered and grumbled at each other until Jake went off to college, and who knows? By that time, we could have been too old and weary to split. Jake had fanned the spark of truth into a flame that burned down the facade, once and for all.
I started looking for an apartment, and two months later I was out of there. It was a relief to me, and a relief to Doris, and probably to Jake as well. We’d all be better off than we’d been before, except for one thing.
That special light was gone from Jake’s eyes. He could still laugh and kid around the way he used to, but there was usually an underlying sarcasm to it, biting and bitter. And it wasn’t until the light was gone that I was able to figure out what it had been.
It was the one emotion that was simply unteachable, and totally undefinable until it was gone.
Joy.
Without that special light, Jake had lost “the look” that got him noticed in the first place. His career began and ended with the grape juice campaign. I took him on some more auditions, but nothing panned out. He was all washed up at age five. He inevitably retreated into himself, having learned that the world is not such a magical place, after all.
But those commercials Jake had already starred in ran and ran and ran, long after the divorce was finalized, long after the light was gone. When the residual checks finally stopped rolling in there was more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bank account of Jacob Perez-Sullivan, to be held in trust for him until either his eighteenth or twenty-first birthday, a date to be determined by both his parents—or, in the event of the death of one parent, by the surviving parent. I don’t know what the ruling was if we were both dead.
Doris took care of the trust fund. I had no idea of what it could be worth by now, with more than a decade’s worth of interest. Jake had never once mentioned the money to me in all those years since his career had crashed and burned. I figured he didn’t know about it.
But he knew, all right. Maybe he came across the trust fund paperwork the day he dug around in his mother’s drawers to find our wedding license. He’d bided his time until the day his English teacher gave that impromptu writing assignment.
In a flash, Jake saw the stars align in his favor—the controversial writing assignment, his mother’s absence—and poked at the little pinhole of light until it was now the big, wide-open gate to what he wanted. Total, absolute freedom from everything and everyone he’s ever known.
Quite a plan. A hell of a plan. Son of a bitch.
Doris and I can’t even say anything for a minute or so. We just look at our son standing there facing us, confronting us, breathing hard but evenly, arms folded across his chest and one booted foot placed defiantly ahead of the other.
Doris clears her throat. “That money is supposed to be for your college education.”
“Aren’t you getting the picture, Mom? I’m not going to college. I’m not even going to finish high school.”
“Ever?”
“I don’t know yet. But for now, this is what I’m doing with that money. And believe me, it’ll be more of an education than any college could offer.”
“Sarah won’t like this. Have you thought of that?”
“We broke up, Mom. And anyway she’s too busy humping Pete Hogan to care about anything else.”
“Oh, Jacob!”
“It’s true. Don’t ever mention her name to me again.”
Doris’s face softens. “Is that what this is all about? You’ve been betrayed, and your heart is broken, so you want to run far, far away?”
“Oh, come on, Mom. That’s not it, and you know it.”
Doris is literally quivering. “You’re frightening me, Jacob.”
It’s the first time I’ve ever heard my ex admit to being scared about something. She’s got a powerful personality, and some might even consider her to be a bit of a bully, but right now she’s totally intimidated by her own son. In a way, I guess it makes sense that the only person who can make her feel this way is the person who came out of her.
“I’d hate to think that I frighten anyone,” Jake says. “I’m just telling you how I feel. Remember, you two are the ones who got that whole thing started with the TV commercials. That wasn’t my idea, was it?”
He taps himself on the chest. “But I’m the one who made those commercials. I’m the one who got teased in the school yard for three years, because those fucking commercials kept running. Think that was fun? Do you think I enjoyed that?”
Doris and I are silent. He’d never complained about being teased, at least not to me. And then it hits me that until now, my son has never really complained about anything, despite all the bad things that have happened to him.
“I did the work,” Jake continues, “and I suffered, and I’ve waited thirteen years to get what I’ve got coming, and I can’t imagine any reason in the world why I shouldn’t have it. It’s my money. It isn’t anybody else’s.”
“College,” Doris all but whispers.
Jake sighs, shakes his head. “I could never go to college the way you’d want me to, Mom. I never liked school very much.”
“But you love to read! You love books!”
“Yeah, I do. That won’t change. You don’t have to go to school to read books. I’ll take a bunch with me. You and Dad can each make a list of what you think I should be reading.”
“Won’t be much overlap on those lists,” I can’t resist saying. Jake smiles. Doris ignores me and plows ahead.
“You’re an honor student!” she sputters.
“Yeah, I was an honor student. That was just to keep you off my back, Mom.”
He sighs, weary with it all. “And now I say—enough, already. All the guys in my class kept talking about where they wanted to go to college, and it was driving me crazy. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown. Blah, blah, blah.” He shakes his head. “The last thing I’d ever want to do is go and live at a school. Jesus! There’d be no relief from it! I’d feel like I was in class twenty-four/seven! I’m not about to waste forty-five grand a year for something I don’t even want, especially when it’s my money!”
He’s shouting by the end of his statement. Doris literally puts her hands over her ears and tilts her face to the floor. I try to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs it away.
“How about if we pay for it?” Doris offers.
“How about if nobody pays for it, Mom?”
“Calm down, Jake,” I say.
He momentarily shuts his eyes, composes himself, resumes speaking. “I just want to do this thing, my thing,” he says softly. “I’ve never really been anywhere or done anything that wasn’t somehow connected to my formal education. Everything’s a part of the big plan…. Well, the hell with that. This is my plan, and I can only pull it off if I’m far, far away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but it’s what I want.”
Doris lifts her head, her eyes red and teary. “Why?”
Jake shrugs. “Maybe I’m just tired of being a hothouse flower, Mom. I’d like to be a dandelion, you know? I want to see what it’s like out there in the weather, feel what it’s like to taste the rain.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. Six months, a year…the point is, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and now I can do it without turning to anyone for help. It’s my money, and I…am…going.”
Doris dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief, shakes her hair, and juts her chin. Whenever she does this, she is braced for battle. “Actually, you will need our consent.”
“Excuse me?”
“The money. It’s yours when you turn twenty-one, not eighteen. Not unless your father and I give our consent.”
“You’ll do that,” Jake says. “I know Dad will.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I say. “I have to think about it.”
Jake goes to his mother, and dares to caress her cheek with a gentle hand.
“Mom,” Jake says, “I’m begging you. I’ve b
een an obedient son, even when I thought your demands were ridiculous, and I don’t think I’ve ever asked for much, or given you any real trouble.”
“Jacob. Need I remind you that you burned a two-thousand-dollar cello on the roof of this house?”
“Because you gave me no other choice. Please, please don’t put me in another corner. I’d hate to think of what I’d burn this time.”
Jake falls to his knees before his mother and clasps his hands together in what would appear to be prayer.
Doris lets her head fall and shuts her eyes. Again I go to her and place a comforting hand on her shoulder. This time, she does not shrug it off. The shoulder feels bony. Doris is tired. She is not a kid anymore, and can’t go fifteen rounds the way she used to.
“Please, Mom,” Jake all but whispers. “Please, please, please don’t fuck this thing up for me.”
Doris turns to me with imploring eyes. She wants to know what I think. She really wants to know what I think. Suddenly, this is my ball game.
I remember what my father had to say to me about being there for Jake. I am there, all right, with my son, at his side, not running off to the woods the way my father did, not failing him, not…bailing out. I take a deep breath, weigh it all up in my heart and my brain. They confer, and the decision, a unanimous one, comes straight from my soul.
“Doris,” I say, “we’ve got to let him do this thing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It is almost as if Jacob-Perez Sullivan, four days past his eighteenth birthday, has gone into the Witness Protection Program. His beard is gone, and his hair is cut even shorter than mine. We owe this miracle to his beloved grandfather, Danny Sullivan, who’d given Jake some valuable advice while the two of them constructed that cobblestone path together a few weeks earlier.
“When you hit the road, Jake, you ought to clean up your appearance,” my father advised. “Shave and a haircut, man. Last thing you want to do these days is resemble a terrorist. Good-lookin’ kid like you, they’ll be cavity-searchin’ you at every port just for the fun of it.”
Raising Jake Page 30