Light of Day

by Jamie M. Saul

  Jack admired his parents’ apartment the way he’d admire any work of art, more than a little in awe of it—it was his mother’s creation, really, his father was the silent partner in this particular operation. “Go with your strength and know when to shut up,” he would say. Interior design may be the small talk of the art world, but when it’s done without apology and derivation, it can stand on its own aesthetic, or so it seemed to Jack when he sat with his parents, the evening etching a path along Park Avenue, up through the windows and across the Oriental rugs. If he knew nothing else about the people who lived here, if this were all he had to go on, he would not have doubted the substance of their hearts or the quality of their minds. If they weren’t his parents, he would have envied their child.

  This was not the apartment in which Jack had grown up. That apartment was on East Sixty-eighth Street, a sprawling duplex with two staircases and a long hallway, uncarpeted, he always believed, to give his parents ample time to uncouple at the sound of their son’s little feet slapping the parquet floor. His bedroom was a clutter of baseballs, bats and gloves, shoulder pads and footballs, clothes and shoes. The bookcases were crammed, not with first editions, but with Best Sports Stories and Red Smith, Ring Lardner, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, film biographies. His bedpost, gnawed and slavered on by Louie, his black Lab, who would outlive two more beds, was draped with jerseys and baseball caps. The walls were dabbed with peanut butter fingerprints, papered with movie posters. His father had set up a small projection room in what later would be the guest room, so Jack could screen the movies he made with his 16-millimeter camera. But the apartment on Park Avenue was his parents’ alone, where Jack, in spite of his mother’s insistence to the contrary, was a guest, which was how he thought it should be. A place of their own for which they’d waited sixteen years—when Jack went off to college—to have; and even if they never said it and surely never made Jack feel it, the wait must have seemed endless at times.

  Jack wondered, after he raised his whiskey and joined in the toast, would he and Anne spend the next sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years waiting as their child calibrated their lives? Would they wait for him or her to leave home? Would they wait, always aware of waiting, to have a place of their own again?

  Jack took another sip of his drink.

  His father walked over to the window. His tall, broad body cast a long shadow against the floor. “You think your mother and I wanted you?” he said to Jack.

  “Your father thinks he’s funny,” Jack’s mother said. “You’re not. You’re not funny, Mike. After all these years you’d think he’d admit to himself the humor gene was lost on him.” She lighted a fresh cigarette. “Please, Mike, this is no time for jokes.”

  “I’m not joking. I think it’s time Jackie knew the truth. We never wanted you. We still don’t.”

  “Believe me,” his mother said, “we wanted you.”

  “It’s a little late for reassurances.” Jack matched his father’s dead-pan. “The damage is done.” And they all laughed, although Jack’s mother reminded them that this was “no laughing matter.”

  “Of course it is,” his father said. “You can’t take life seriously all the time.”

  “There are couples out there who’d give everything to have a baby,” Jack’s mother said, “so don’t take it for granted.”

  “How does Anne feel about it?” his father wanted to know.

  “The same way I do.”

  “Everyone is scared the first time.”

  “That’s not it. Or maybe we’re just not sure what it is we’re scared of.” He swallowed the rest of his drink. “Anne and I are happy with the way things are. We don’t want a baby to spoil that. To weigh us down.”

  “Endless childhood?” his father asked.

  “You know better than that.”

  “We don’t know better than anything,” his mother said. “Opinions, however, are another story.”

  “And your opinion?”

  His parents exchanged fast glances, the way they used to when Jack would ask them questions about sex.

  “It goes without saying,” his mother said, “that the idea of your father and me being grandparents is thrilling.” There was always a hint of amusement in her voice, as though she already knew the winner of the race, the final score, but was keeping it to herself until everyone else caught up to her. It was there now. She already knew what Jack and Anne were going to decide, even as she said, “You know my stand on abortion, but if you and Anne are considering it you should have a better reason than ‘too bourgeois’ or else you’re just playing Peter Pan to her Wendy and I don’t think that’s very healthy.” She snuffed out her cigarette.

  “That’s it? That’s your opinion?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” his father said.

  “Trust your instincts, Jackie,” his mother told him. “They’ll never steer you wrong.”

  “By the way, where is Anne?” his father asked. “I’d think she’d want to be in on this.”

  “She’s over on Seventy-first Street hanging her show. She’ll be here later.”

  “An Upper East Side gallery.” His mother smiled. “Very bohemian.”

  Jack held the tiny red sweater in his hand and the white baby shoes, then gently placed them in the carton. He looked through another set of photographs: Danny’s summer in France. And another: the summer in Tuscany.

  He wiped the sweat off his face and worked on the next set of pictures, slowly. There was no reason to hurry. Methodically. There was no reason not to be thorough.

  He sorted through the photographs of his mother and father. There were even a few photographs of Maggie—Not your finest hour, Jack—and he thought for a moment about Maggie Brighton, who taught English lit in Bloomington, and played piano duets with Danny on Sunday afternoons. Then Jack quickly pulled out more pictures of Danny with Anne, Anne sitting by herself on a bench in Central Park, on vacation in Dorset.

  He wondered what it would feel like to talk to Anne. He’d been thinking about talking to her ever since the funeral because she was Danny’s mother—You and Anne used to talk about everything. What would you say to her now? “We can’t undo what’s been done, but our son, he was ours, Anne, is dead, and you should know about it.”

  Would she say: “You must have me confused with some other woman named Anne.” Would she say: “I wish I could help you, Jack.” Or: “It’s been such a long time, I don’t even know who Danny is.” Would she say: “I don’t even know you.” There’d be no apology in that voice, just straight and unfiltered: “I don’t know why you called me, Jack.” Or would she understand why because she was Anne, and Danny’s mother, and that can never change?

  It disturbed him to admit that he wanted to talk to Anne, as though the past ten years had been some accident. It disturbed him to think about talking to her the way they used to talk when they were married, when they would lie on the bed and whisper in the dark; the way they used to talk before Danny was born. It disturbed him to think that some flaw in his character had weakened his resolve, that with one call he’d annihilate, demythologize, Dr. Owens, who packed his life into a truck-load of boxes and took his son to the safest place he could think of. Who had the confidence—the arrogance, Jack?—to think he could undo the damage.

  It disturbed him to think about Anne the way he was thinking about her now. It disturbed him to think that he was being disloyal to Danny even as he wanted to talk to Anne like they used to how many lifetimes ago, because he couldn’t get through this alone, and she was the only one he wanted to talk to. The only one who would understand this kind of sorrow—“Can you help me figure it out? Can you tell me why he did it?”

  It disturbed him to think about her asking: “Can we always be like this? Loving each other and living our lives together?” And he’d answered, “I don’t know why not.”

  But he hadn’t understood the question—he hadn’t understood what was in her voice. Just as he hadn’t understood Anne, who aske
d it.

  He hadn’t understood the meaning of the question when Anne asked it the day they looked at the house he loved. Jack had never understood the question so he interpreted the question to his own design. Only years later, when The Baby had become Danny, did Jack understand the meaning of the question, and understand Anne, who had asked it. Only then did he know the sum total of his ignorance. Now, in the dead heat of the attic, feeling as though he were standing outside of himself, watching himself, as he wondered if he was going mad, Jack fantasized about Anne understanding, as no one else could understand, his sadness. Because he understood that Anne had never understood her own question, had never understood that asking it was asking for an answer that did not include Danny. But Jack had understood, ever since Anne said she was leaving. Only now could he tell her.

  The corner of a label clung to his forearm like a lamprey. The air in the attic was hot with lint and wool dropping from the old clothes, sticking to his skin, sealing the air out of his pores; that must have been why he was having trouble breathing, but he kept looking at the pictures, aligning the corners, placing them in boxes, marking the dates and the places.

  He imagined calling Danny’s name, calling to him to come up for a minute: “Want to see what your first pair of shoes looked like?” Calling to him: “I want you to see a picture of you and Granma…” While he waded elbow-deep in photographs and baby clothes, elbow-deep in memories.

  But Jack wanted to remember Danny not as a baby, or the little boy in the photographs hugging his grandmother, holding his new puppy. He didn’t want to think about Danny, who was acting “weird” on the school bus, who was withdrawn and somber, or sat silently at the breakfast table while his food went untouched and asked: “Which is more important, Dad, honesty or loyalty?” Jack wanted to remember Danny who was becoming a young man, who last September asked, “What would you think if I decided to go away to college?”

  “Any particular school?”

  “I was thinking about Michigan or Wisconsin. Or do you want me to go to college in Indiana?”

  “No. Just as long as it’s a good school. I’m glad you’re starting to think about it.”

  “What if I wanted to be a classical pianist?”

  “I’d say you’re talented enough to become one.”

  “What if I wanted to be a baseball player?”

  “I’d say give it your best try. But there are better baseball and music programs than Michigan and Wisconsin.” When Danny didn’t answer, Jack said, “What are you really asking me?”

  Danny looked away for a moment, and when he looked back his face was flushed. When he spoke, his voice was tight and strained. “What if I’m not as smart as you when I’m older?”

  “You already are. And smarter, even.”

  “No, really.”

  “Really.”

  “But suppose I don’t write books like you or become a famous pianist or composer?”

  “Who says that has anything to do with being smart? Only a very smart person questions the limits of his intelligence.”

  Danny sat silently for a moment and Jack did not intrude on that silence.

  “I’m just afraid sometimes,” Danny said after a while.

  “Can you tell me what you’re afraid of?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  They were sitting next to each other on the back steps, it was night, after supper and homework. Jack put his arm around Danny’s shoulder and pulled him close, which made Danny look embarrassed and avert his eyes.

  Jack wanted to remember the feel of Danny’s presence. He wanted to remember the weight of his body in the car when he sat behind the wheel just last April and Jack let him drive to the stop sign at the end of the road, the way Danny shifted gears and tapped the accelerator and smiled so broadly and proud when the car responded that Jack had to reach over and tousle his hair and tell him, “You are the man.”

  Danny laughed and reluctantly gave up the driver’s seat. He talked about next year when he’d be old enough to get a learner’s permit and how he wanted to get a job after school and start saving for a car.

  When Danny was with his friends out at the mall on Saturday afternoons, when he was in school, when he stood on the pitcher’s mound and looked in for the sign, was he already thinking about suicide? When he talked about college or learning to drive, was it already inside of him? Was he hiding that the way he hid the box under the bed?

  “Why weren’t you listening, Jack? Why weren’t you paying attention?”

  What was in Danny’s voice back in May?

  “What was he saying? What weren’t you hearing?”

  Jack leaned against one of the cartons. His lips were dry and his tongue felt thick in his mouth. His skin itched. When he shifted his body, his legs and arms dragged weakly beneath him and bursts of light appeared before his eyes. He felt the heat enveloping him and had trouble remembering where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. There was a humming in his ears, as though voices were in conversation downstairs, or just outside the house.

  Even with the window open, the attic was airless. He listened to the beating of his heart, the pulsing of the blood in his temples. He knew he was dehydrating. If he didn’t get out of this heat, he would surely die. But when he tried to stand, he fell back on the floor. He would try again in a minute.

  Outside, the moon was rising over the trees and the trees beat their branches against the window.

  XII

  He was lying on his bedroom floor naked and sweating, the telephone pressed under his cheek. He was holding on to one of Danny’s baby pictures and mumbling to himself. He could smell his sour breath, he could smell his own stale body odor. He had no idea what day it was. He could not remember coming down here, or who he’d tried to call, or when.

  He put down the phone, started to get up, and his knees buckled. He leaned against the bed and when he managed to stand he saw himself in the mirror, or what was left of him. A ragged face, a gaunt body, filthy with lint and dust, a dull, abandoned look in his eye, like the survivor of a shipwreck.

  The telephone rang. He felt nothing but dread. When he picked it up and said “Hello,” the word broke apart in his mouth. A bitter taste of bile curdled in his throat. He waited for the voice at the other end. Grace’s voice. The doctor’s voice. He waited for the bad news.

  The voice said it was “Marty.” Jack didn’t remember anyone named Marty. It said, “I saw the movie.”

  “Movie,” Jack repeated dimly.

  “Blade Runner.”

  “Marty, the detective?”

  “I wanted to have a little more insight into Danny, so I rented it. I had no idea—that’s one hell of a movie.”

  “I’m in the middle of something, Marty. I can’t really talk right now.”

  “Fair enough. I just wanted to tell you it really impressed me, and I’d like to get together and talk to you about it.”

  “I’ll call you sometime.”

  “I’ll look forward—How are you doing? Under the circumstances. You’re doing all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Getting out of the house, seeing people?”

  Sweat ran down Jack’s neck and the length of his spine. “I’m seeing people.”

  “Great. I was hoping you and I could have a beer or something.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  “What about tonight? It’s so damn hot. We can go over to the Palomino for a cold one.”

  “You caught me at a bad time.”

  “What’s a good night for you?”

  “There aren’t any good nights.” Jack felt like a drunk scrambling in the dark for his keys, scrambling to get away from this conversation. Scrambling for some part of himself. His teeth were chattering, his hands trembled. Marty wouldn’t need his books to recognize the carnage. “Maybe you need him to see you like this,” Jack whispered.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m here.”


  “How about seven?” Marty said, talking past him. “They put in air-conditioning.”

  The Palomino Grille was long past its glory days, when it was the fanciest speakeasy in town, or so the old-timers claimed. When Prohibition was repealed, it was the first speakeasy in the state to get a full liquor license—something to do with its clientele, which included the mayor, governor and both U.S. senators—and easily transformed itself into a legitimate bar and steak joint, a Grille, with beautiful stained-glass windows and a bubbling jukebox that played Fred Rose, Jimmie Rodgers, Tex Ritter and even some Woody Guthrie. It wasn’t the first place Jack would have picked to have a drink, or even the second. He hadn’t been here since his student days, when he and his friends came by to soak up the local color and drink the very affordable beer.

  There was a relaxed, broken-in feel to the place, the oak bar, the dim lighting, the worn-out tables and soft chairs. The air-conditioning was tolerably cool and the conversations were muted, just a bunch of men, some of them old-timers, the old miners and railroad men, some simply old-timers-in-the-making, sitting around, drinking, letting the evening pass quietly and leisurely toward closing time. The Palomino was the closest thing Gilbert had to an old-fashioned tavern, not the sort of place that attracted hard drinkers or anyone looking to make trouble, where a man whose son had killed himself just two months ago might not necessarily feel too overwhelmed.

  Marty was sitting by the window in the front of the barroom drinking a beer and, when he saw Jack, signaled the bartender to bring over two more bottles. Jack started sweating. The acrid taste of fear was on his tongue. He should not have left the house and the telephone unattended. It was a mistake to have come here. He tapped his foot, picked at the skin around his cuticles while Marty looked him over, not saying anything, just watching him and doing the same remarkable thing with his face that he’d done the first time they’d met, and which now made Jack sit down and keep still.