Between You and Me

by Scott Nadelson

  “The neighbors won’t like a strange car sitting in the street,” he told the boy. “They like their atmosphere the way it is.”

  “I’m just collecting details,” the boy said.

  “You could collect details in Williamstown.”

  “It’s research. For a class.”

  “On what? Landscape architecture?”

  The boy looked away and muttered, “Poetry.”

  “This is at Drew?”

  “County,” he said, and when Paul turned toward the back of the car, as if he could double-check the bumper sticker from where he sat, the boy added, “My brother went there. Used to be his car.”

  How anyone could write a poem about the view from the curb looking up at his house, Paul had no idea. A teacher at Drew might have come up with a better assignment. But then, it had never occurred to Paul to write a poem about anything, and he didn’t see why someone would. He didn’t see why someone would make costumes for terrible plays, either, or embark on a treacherous journey around Africa, marauding villages along the way, or use up half of every Saturday washing and waxing an old Corvette.

  “What’s the poem about?”

  The boy scratched the scruff on his chin and shrugged. “I’m supposed to describe the trees and bushes and peeling paint, and it’s all supposed to be a metaphor for the way I feel. Except I don’t feel like fucking trees and bushes.”

  The paint was indeed peeling on the eaves, but Paul hadn’t noticed until the boy pointed it out. He hadn’t noticed how big the rhododendrons had grown, or else he’d noticed but hadn’t registered it. They’d come up only to his shins when he’d first moved in, when he didn’t know what they were called, and now they were chest high, their branches gnarled, bent at knobby elbows where Cynthia had pruned them.

  “She wants to know how I feel? I feel like an asshole.” The boy snapped his notebook shut and leaned forward, head on the steering wheel. “We hang out all summer, like every night, and then she doesn’t call once. Like I don’t even fucking exist.”

  If the poem were Paul’s, what would it say? Did he feel like the trees and bushes, surprised to find himself so deeply rooted, sagging after the long, humid summer? Or did he feel more like the peeling paint, flaking and fluttering in the breeze? Or was it possible to feel like all those things at the same time?

  “I don’t sleep with just anyone,” the boy said. “I don’t get those guys who’ll pop any girl’ll let him. Someone sees you naked and then you never talk to them again? It’s too fucking intimate. It’s got to mean something.”

  Paul didn’t want to think about the boy naked, and especially not with his stepdaughter, but he couldn’t help picturing Joy sitting right where he was, bare back exposed to anyone who might pass, head in the boy’s lap, hair fanned across his legs. It was too warm in the car. On the dashboard were scuff marks from someone’s heel. His fingers on the armrest touched something gluey. He rubbed them on the seat.

  “I would have quit that job if it wasn’t for her. Chef’s on me all the time like I’m supposed to be able to scrub his grill and clean his goddamn pans at the same time. But she tells me to stick it out, I’m the only reason she comes to work every day, she doesn’t know what she’d do in this wasteland all summer without me. You’d think it means something to her, too, right? I should have known better. She never brings me to hang out with her friends. She never brings me over here. I bet she never even mentioned my name.”

  “She calls her mother every week,” Paul said. “But she never asks to talk to me.”

  “I feel like shit,” the boy said. “That’s my poem. Ode to a fucking toilet.”

  “Did she happen to tell you I’m paying her tuition?”

  The boy opened the notebook again and scribbled. From this angle, even through a web of windshield cracks, the house against the backdrop of early autumn woods looked elegant, though it was built in 1976, when elegance was far from most builders’ minds. The false shutters that didn’t close, the concrete steps covered in moss, the rusting swing set just visible in the backyard, all of it as familiar to him now as the stone façade of his old apartment building, with its weathered awning and concrete planters the doormen used as ashtrays. And taking it in, he suffered an unspecified pang. Twelve years. He wanted to tell the boy he’d tried his hardest to be a real parent to the kids, or at least a real figure of authority and support, but he wasn’t sure if that was true. He wanted to describe Joy as he’d known her over that time, the impossible transformations she’d undergone—from a precocious waif in muddy sandals, to an aspiring cheerleader with no rhythm, to a disgruntled punk rocker whose spiked bracelets left marks on the leather couch, to the sincere scholar in boots she’d become most recently. What had never changed was her way of looking at Paul with an odd sort of scrutiny, as if she didn’t know where he’d come from or what he’d do next, as if, after twelve years, he was still just a stranger who’d showed up in the house one day and never left, his finger buried to the knuckle in whipped cream.

  “Don’t tell her I was here,” the boy said.

  “I’d like to see the poem when it’s done,” Paul said.

  His train was due in twenty minutes, and his attaché case was still in the kitchen. If he didn’t leave now he’d have to drive all the way into the city and pay for parking and tolls. The thought made him sit upright and rub his eyes, but looking out the cracked window, breathing in the smell of smoke and mildew, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling of being half-asleep, unable to focus his vision. And just as he was opening the door, the shock of full morning light making him shade his eyes, Cynthia’s car edged out of the driveway. His instinct was to duck down, as the boy did, but it was too late. Cynthia gave him a look similar to Joy’s, one that said she still didn’t understand him after all these years, that he still managed to surprise her. He gave a little wave and made his way back to the house.

  •

  That evening, Cynthia had already left for rehearsal by the time Paul made it home from work. He ate dinner, spent a few minutes trying to read, and then pulled out a pen and a pad of paper. He knew nothing about poetry. He’d read hardly any since high school, and aside from Robert Frost snippets he’d since seen on greeting cards, only one line stuck in his memory, by a poet whose name he couldn’t recall: I struck the board and cried, “No more.” He’d always liked the defiance of the words, though if he remembered correctly the poem ended in submission. The boy had talked about collecting details, but when Paul glanced around he saw nothing worth noting. A lamp, the TV, a stack of old magazines, his thick volume on da Gama, a bookmark less than eighty pages in.

  When the doorbell rang, he set aside the pen and pad—still blank—with relief. He expected to find the boy in the knit cap standing on the front steps, asking to come in and absorb more atmosphere. And Paul would have let him, making coffee or offering a glass of bourbon, happy to fill even a small amount of the time left before Cynthia returned.

  Instead, when he opened the door, there was a police officer, and behind him, the black neighbor, looking stern, arms crossed over a blue tie. “Sorry to bother you,” the officer said, pulling on his chin. He was hardly older than the boy in the Honda, though his cheeks were freshly shaven, his voice clearly pitched, his face incapable, it seemed, of the kind of grief that made the boy lower his head onto the steering wheel. He was also far more polite than the last policeman who’d come to the house, after Paul had accidentally dialed 911 and then, realizing his mistake, hung up in a panic, without alerting the dispatcher. That one, closer to Paul’s age, had delivered a long, severe lecture and just as Paul thought it was over, began writing out a ticket. “We’ve had reports,” the officer said, turning his head just slightly in the direction of the neighbor, “of a strange car parked on the street in front of your house. And you know, with all the break-ins in the area, we want to make sure there’s no trouble.”

  The neighbor stared hard at Paul, with a look either suspicious or skeptical. He h
ad close-cropped hair, and his mustache was nearly as gray as Paul’s. There was no reason he shouldn’t have been a friend, or at least on speaking terms. Paul no longer liked the officer’s smile, which now struck him as scoffing, as if the neighbor didn’t have legitimate concerns. He wanted to take the opportunity to make things right, to repair past damages, to set his life—which, since he’d first spotted the Honda on the street, seemed misaligned, headed in the wrong direction—onto a proper course.

  But just as he was ready to explain about the boy and his stepdaughter, about the poetry class at County, a thought came into his mind, a series of words so unexpected and mystifying that he took a deep breath and held it, turning the words over in his mind several times while he stood there, smiling stupidly at the neighbor and the officer, one hand on the door, already inching it closed. “Haven’t noticed anything,” he said. The officer thanked him and winked. The neighbor, stone-faced, turned away.

  Paul hurried back to his chair, picked up the pen and pad, and with a burst of vitality he’d never felt before, or at least not for as long as he could remember, wrote feverishly:

  Around the Cape of Good Hope,

  A black man in a green Corvette

  As soon as the words were down, the breath rushed from his lungs, and a woozy fatigue replaced his excitement. His fingers were already cramping around the pen. He set it down and yawned. He didn’t know what to make of the lines, or what to add to them, and soon the letters blurred in his vision, his chin sinking to his chest.

  He woke to find Cynthia standing in front of him, the pad in her hand. Her look was puzzled, or maybe concerned, eyes partially squinted, brows nearly touching. But she didn’t ask him about what he’d written or why. She didn’t ask him about the car on the street, either, or the boy with the knit cap. Instead, she told him about new troubles with the production at the JCC. The director had a cold. The actress playing Heidi had put on weight and no longer fit in the dresses Cynthia had made. “And the male lead just quit,” she said. “We need a new Peter.”

  Paul was groggy, and embarrassed that she’d seen the pad, and also, as he roused himself, overtaken by intolerable sadness. How many nights would he spend like this, alone in the house, dozing in his chair, with nothing to occupy him but books he didn’t want to read and TV he didn’t want to watch and words that now, imagining them through Cynthia’s eyes, he recognized as nonsense?

  He struggled to follow what Cynthia was saying, and when he finally caught up, she was pacing in front of him, waving the pad. “I know you think it’s crazy,” she said. “But I talked it over with Riva, and she agrees. You’re the right size and body shape. You’d fit into all the costumes. And just because you’ve never acted doesn’t mean anything. You couldn’t be any worse than Bob.” Then she stopped next to his chair and laid a hand on his shoulder. “And it wouldn’t hurt you to have something to focus on other than work. I hate to see you drifting like this. I always knew it would be hard when the kids went away, but I’ve been preparing for it since they were toddlers. For you, it’s probably a total shock.”

  She set the pad on the table beside him, face down. He had an urge to pick it up and read the lines he’d written, to make sure there wasn’t any hidden insight in them, some secret to living just out of reach. But of course he knew them by heart. Before he could make a move, Cynthia eased herself onto his lap. “It would give us a chance to spend more time together, too,” she said. “Now that it’s just the two of us, we can try new things. We’ve got to keep life interesting.”

  Her arms were around his neck, her face an inch from his. The lips he knew so well, the cheeks that had rounded out over the past twelve years, marked now by a few liver spots, the dark, mischievous eyes that hadn’t changed since he’d first seen them, gazing at him across a seder plate. These were things he hadn’t paid enough attention to, that he should have stared at, made notes on, every day. It had never really occurred to him that life ought to be interesting, that this was a privilege he deserved, or that he could choose to make it so. It had been, despite his lack of effort. And he supposed it would continue to be, whether he intended to work at it or not.

  Cynthia kissed him and leaned away. Her smile was shy but unguarded, her expression full of expectation, of tentative hope. Was it his job to surprise her, tonight and for the rest of his life? “What do you say? Give it a shot?”

  He tried to picture himself on stage, lights shining in his face, an invisible audience cringing every time he opened his mouth. He thought of the heartbroken boy in the knit cap, making notes about peeling paint, of da Gama shooting cannons at bewildered villagers in the name of Portuguese power, of his co-workers making love on a copy machine. So few things people did made any sense. But they had to do something with the time they had.

  “What do I get to wear?” he asked.

  Nocturne for left hand

  He’s been working on the letter for almost a week, spending an hour or so after dinner jotting down his thoughts. If he were to compile all his efforts so far, the letter would be more than twenty pages long, carefully handwritten, starting in cursive and switching halfway through to print. But each evening he starts over from the beginning and as yet has nothing close to complete. “Dear Kyle,” he writes again tonight, at the little desk that folds out of the bureau in his office—a piece of furniture he’s had every place he’s lived since college—where he does bills once a month and taxes once a year. “First, let me just say how proud I am. Of what you’ve done, of the person you’ve become. A stepfather’s pride is different from a father’s, I think. I don’t have the same stake in your accomplishments. They aren’t a product of my genes. I can’t take any, or much, credit for your success. So it’s just pride by association. I’m proud to have been around to watch this happen.”

  He has written these sentiments, in almost exactly the same way, the last three nights in a row, and he is reasonably happy with them now. They capture, closely enough, the feeling that struck him last week, when Kyle reported to Cynthia that he’d been accepted to medical school at Hopkins. At the time, once the astonishment passed, the intense disbelief, Paul was overtaken by such a swelling of emotion that he grabbed Cynthia and lifted her, with effort, off the ground. “I’ll write to him right now,” he said, without having been conscious of planning to do so, and without much notion of what the letter might say. All he knew was that he had to say it before the feeling passed.

  “You could just give him a call,” Cynthia said, but by then he was already hurrying to his office and deciding which color pen was most appropriate. Black would be too formal, he thought, too severe, but after a number of false starts, he concluded that blue was too whimsical. Tonight he has returned to black.

  The opening paragraph has always been the easiest, and after finishing it again he leans back in his chair and gazes out the window at the cone of orange light cast by the streetlamp, the dark road on either side, the slick, tender leaves just unfurling from buds on the neighbor’s oak. Then he continues. “I know we’ve had some rocky moments over the past few years,” he writes, and debates once more whether or not to refer directly to the check bouncing incident of Kyle’s freshman year, or the DUI incident sophomore year, both of which cost Paul less in money than in sleepless nights and heartburn. He wants to bring them up only to show that his feelings are complex and deeply felt, not sentimentalized by selective amnesia. It would be easier to pretend that Kyle has been a model child, studious and attentive from the start, but to do so would be to negate his remarkable turnaround, from a kid descending into criminality, or at least mediocrity, to one who’s made the Dean’s List in each of his last four semesters.

  “But I always knew you could live up to your abilities,” Paul goes on, deciding that “rocky moments” are as much reference to past troubles as he needs. “I always believed you could do whatever you set your mind to,” he writes, and then stops. He can imagine Kyle reaching this point and laughing a derisive laugh, or worse,
crumpling the letter in anger and tossing it into the wastebasket. In either case, there’s no chance he’ll buy this line, Paul knows. He wants to buy it himself, but the longer he stares at the words the less plausible they seem, the more delusional. The truth is, he didn’t think Kyle could hack pre-med when he first declared his major, not even after that initial semester with near-perfect grades. Wouldn’t he be better off with something less ambitious? he asked Cynthia at the time. Psychology, maybe, or nursing? Cynthia only shrugged and said, “If he fails he fails. There are worse things a person can do.”

  A year and a half later Paul thought Kyle was aiming too high when he heard which medical schools he was applying to, including several of the country’s most prestigious, and wondered whether he should consider choosing a back-up or two. Had he looked at any of the second-tier state schools? And what about programs in Latin America? Paul had once gone to a gastroenterologist who’d gotten his degree in Bogotá. Again he said these things only to Cynthia, and he doubted she passed them on to Kyle. Between applications going out and responses coming in, Paul suffered a fresh bout of insomnia. What trouble would follow rejection? More bounced checks? Another DUI? Or something worse, something he couldn’t yet imagine?

  No, Paul didn’t believe in Kyle, he never had, and now he thinks he’s never believed in anyone’s abilities, not his stepchildren’s, not his wife’s, not his own. He expects everyone to fail and cringes at the mildest risk. He tears up the letter and starts again. “Dear Kyle, First, let me just say how proud I am…” This time when he reaches the second paragraph he forces himself to be honest. “I should have believed in you,” he writes, “but I was afraid of being disappointed, afraid to see you disappoint yourself. It was easier to think nothing would come of your hard work than to put my hopes in something that might not pan out. It’s always been easier to expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised when the worst doesn’t happen.”