At our wedding reception, index cards were left at the place setting of every guest. Printed across the top of each card was the inscription, “Advice for the newlyweds …” Most of the responses were humorous, and we read them all later in bed on our honeymoon. Not so long afterwards, when I was packing for Calvin and my move to Kansas, I found the cards, hairy with mildew, stored in a shoe box. All the answers are right here, I thought, simply for the asking. You, too, could solve each and every marital problem by rifling through these index cards, searching for the proper advice—the cure for whatever ails you. One I remember, even now, ended with the phrase: “Don’t lose the connection. It is special, it is rare.”
But something inflated between us, quickly, and would not burst.
“Thank you for letting me come,” she says, smoothing out the wrinkled coloring-book page against the hard surface of the table. “It means the world to me.”
Beside the closet in the front hallway we discuss plans to meet tomorrow morning for brunch. I hold open Kate’s coat and she slides her arms through. She asks if she can keep the colored page, and when I say yes, she neatly folds it into four sections and places it inside her purse. Staring down at the muddied tips of her shoes, she manages, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For things. That our lives became so separate. That things turned out so different than we planned. And”—slowly, she nudges wider a crack between the front door and the molding, and from where I am standing, behind, I can see her lower lip tremble—“that I have not been there every evening to kiss Calvin good night.”
Nothing is easy about Kate trying to bleed her way back into Calvin’s life, back into our lives. We hug awkwardly, rapidly, and then she drives back to her motel room, alone, with me on the front step in my stocking feet.
Cigarette smoke filters through a vent in the Tarent High locker room and Noah is standing on a chair, waving the smoke toward his face before inhaling deeply. He has not seen me enter, but I throw a broken piece of chalk at his hip to call his attention. They have won, again, and are wandering about the small, cement room dressed in towels and boxer shorts. Midway through the third quarter, after Eric Shaw sank a jump shot to put the Trojans ahead by 19, I realized that I had very little to do with the success of this team. It is a talented collection of athletes and the best thing I can do is offer some well-timed advice and then stand back and enjoy.
“You played a good game,” I say, handing a Kleenex to Chris Rayles, who is rather vigorously picking at his right nostril. “Practice, tomorrow, usual time.” Before I leave them, I ask, “Would someone please do me a favor? Last person out tonight flip the lock on the double doors.”
Calvin and Kate have spent the day together and are waiting for me in the front lobby. This is the first home game Zoe has missed, but we are meeting her at Cale’s for a quick bite once her shift has ended. When I arrive, Calvin is speaking rather emphatically to an older gentleman in a maroon jacket, explaining the two switches on his airplane: one to operate the lights and the other, the engine noises.
“And do you have any idea how fast this type of jet travels?”
“Not really,” says Calvin, rubbing the nose cone with his thumb. “But it’s fast. Faster than my dad’s car.”
This causes both Kate and the older man to laugh.
“Faster than my car?” I ask.
“Prob’lee.”
“Okay, then,” I say, lifting the bangs from his eyebrows.
At Cale’s we take a table in the rear, beside an unplugged Addams Family pinball machine and a slanted painting of two fishermen hauling in a net at high sea. Calvin kneels on a chair and waves his airplane across the room at Zoe. For several minutes we are still, listening to the jukebox rumble from one twangy country song to the next. Some men would not put Zoe, or themselves, in this situation. Thorny, hazardous. But now I am selfish. More than anything, I need her support. And Kate will not show spite; she will mind her tongue. She is grateful, I know, that I have allowed her into our lives again, however short the visit.
Finally, Kate opens a menu and says, “She’s very pretty.” As if staged, called, Zoe carries over a cork-lined tray with three bottles of Budweiser, placing them in front of Kate, Calvin, and me.
“You let him drink beer?” asks Kate.
“It’s orange juice,” says Zoe. “He likes it in these bottles.”
Then Zoe drops the tray to her side and reaches for Kate’s hand. “Hi, I’m Zoe.”
Kate introduces herself, too, and I apologize for my lapse in manners.
“We’re used to that by now,” says Zoe, winking at Kate and Calvin. “You’ll have to excuse me for a few minutes. Just need to total my receipts and then I’ll be finished.”
She cannot take long enough. If I were standing on the outside, peering inward, I would give this whole little scene a gentle bump, like someone trying to keep a spinning silver ball from dropping between the flippers on that Addams Family pinball machine. Watching Zoe and Kate together in the same state, in the same room, leaves me short of breath. I make eye contact only with Calvin and some old guy sitting at the table behind us.
After fried-chicken baskets all around, we drink coffee and Kate tells Zoe about her uncle’s ranch in north Texas, near the Oklahoma border town Zoe recently visited. At one point during their conversation, Zoe removes a small notepad from her purse and writes down something Kate says about a blue peeling around some of the cattle’s noses. When their discussion aimlessly wanders to Calvin, who is nearly asleep, his head resting against my thigh, I mention that perhaps we should get him home.
She has not seen her son in half a lifetime, his lifetime, and we spend the evening discussing diseased bovines.
“Oh, it is late,” says Kate.
Zoe maps out directions on the back of a napkin from the parking lot of Cale’s to Kate’s motel. She does this without Kate’s asking.
“Thanks.”
“Here’s the only tricky part,” says Zoe, pointing to the black webbing of lines. “At this second stoplight, take the soft, angling right—not the hard one.”
Beside the cars, Kate kisses Calvin and thanks Zoe and me for being so kind. Again, we make plans to meet tomorrow, sometime in the late morning. Then she leaves and Zoe follows me home in her truck.
“You don’t say much to her,” says Zoe, shirtless in bed.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“You’re not supposed to say anything. But it looks so difficult for you—like you’re really struggling.”
“I am.”
“With what?”
“I’m struggling not to explode. Not to start screaming at her—go absolutely nuts.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?” I ask, laying my book on the nightstand. “The real question is why haven’t I done it yet. Why haven’t I ripped her a new asshole for leaving—for leaving Calvin.”
“Gordon,” she says, sitting up, bracing herself against the headboard. “If you feel a need to do this, then do it. But you’ve got to have it out with her, tell her what’s upsetting you. Not for her sake, but for yours.” Zoe’s breasts hang free, nipples rimmed in random Braille, shaking as she speaks. “Maybe this isn’t only about Kate trying to make her peace with Calvin, but about you making peace with her. Christ, make peace with yourself.”
“Peace, always peace. Maybe I don’t want peace.”
“Shut up, Gordon,” she says, switching off the light above her side of the bed. “Act like a man.”
The house shifts, settling ever so slightly into its brick base, and the walls respond with a creaky gasp.
“Weaverbirds,” I say, into the black night air.
“Huh?”
“Weaverbirds. Do you know about them?”
“No, Gordon, I sure don’t.”
“They’re indigenous to Africa—south of the Sahara, mostly. The male weavers build these enormous communal nests in the tops of trees
or, sometimes, even telephone poles, using twigs and bark pieces and loose blades of grass. Then, as a way of courting, the males offer their nests to available females by hanging beak-down and flapping their yellow-and-green wings from the nests’ short entry tubes. Often, the males fall and have to fly up again into the mouths of the nest.”
Zoe crosses her ankles beneath our quilt, puffy with eiderdown.
“If the males fail to attract a female, they destroy their section of the nest and move on, hoping next time they will be more successful.”
The bed dips as Zoe scoots closer to the middle, her hand groping for mine.
“And you’re flapping your wings again,” she says. “I can almost feel the breeze.” She swallows, laboriously.
“If things don’t work here, will you wreck this nest and move on?”
It is nearly two in the morning when the telephone rings and I lift it, instinctively, placing the receiver to my ear, saying nothing, simply letting my breath run across the perforated well of the mouthpiece. It is Sergeant Ray Lockwood of the Tarent Police Department and from what I can make out, in my semiconscious state, he is at the school with one of my basketball players. He wants me to come and take the boy home.
Standing at the foot of the bed, half dressed, I tell Zoe about school. “It shouldn’t take long,” I say. She responds with a grunt.
In the gymnasium, lit only by two emergency flood-lamps above the door, Sergeant Lockwood is relaying information to someone on a hand-held walkie-talkie. Prone on the floor at his side is Noah, hands curled and cuffed and resting in the small of his back. There are six empty beer cans strewn atop a tattered army blanket.
“Is this really necessary?” I ask.
Sergeant Lockwood holds up his finger, signaling me to wait for a second. Then he says, “We can take the cuffs off now that you’re here.”
“What happened?”
“We were driving by, nightly patrol, and saw lights on in here. He broke in, was drinking beer with his girlfriend.”
“I didn’t break in,” says Noah, speaking into the hardwood floor.
“He didn’t break in,” I add. “He was supposed to close up.”
Sergeant Lockwood grabs Noah through his armpits and lifts him to his feet. Using a small silver key, he unlocks the cuffs and places them back into a holster on his belt. Noah stretches his arms, massaging the redness from his wrists.
“Where’s the girl?” I ask.
“Her father came to get her about twenty minutes ago.”
“Why didn’t you call his father?”
“He asked us to call you.”
When Sergeant Lockwood says this, Noah looks away, searching for something to hold in his line of vision, something in a direction other than mine. Before Sergeant Lockwood leaves, he tells me there aren’t any charges, this time, but in the future I should call the police station if someone is going to be in the gym after midnight.
“He’s underage too,” says Sergeant Lockwood, kicking one of the beer cans on his way out.
The drive to Noah’s house is nearly silent, the only noise being the gentle hiss of the car’s tires against asphalt. Finally, as I stop at the end of his driveway so the headlights will not jump through the shutters and awaken his father, Noah turns to me.
“Listen—” he says, but before he can say anything else I slam my fist into the dashboard and he pulls back. Quiet.
“Cocksucker,” I say, if only to hear how the word sounds coming from my mouth. I want to strike him hard, in the face and neck and stomach, bringing blood that he will taste across the wide, fishy tail of his tongue. I want to hit him hard for all the times I’ve wanted to hit him, for the times I’ve wanted to hit my own son. But when I raise my arm, Noah doesn’t flinch. He has been hit before. Maybe many times—at once and over scattered, passing years. He inhales, scared, the breath breaking into small, manageable pockets to be parceled sparingly along the honeycomb ridges of his lungs.
Above the radio, the clock snip, snip, snips along. Is this the kind of boy who later, once he is married and has a family of his own, watches the teenage girl next door undress from the bushes below her illuminated window? Or leaves his wife spooning strained peaches to their child so he can sleep with a waitress? Or, worst of all, decides one day that he has simply had enough?
“What are you going to do?” he asks.
This is a difficult question, and for the first time, maybe the first time ever, I hear genuine concern in Noah’s voice. My father would have suspended him, immediately, and so, probably, would have Coach Miller. This is also what I want to do, once the need to abuse him physically passes. But before, in the gym, as Noah lay face down with those big, shiny handcuffs blazing in the floodlights and Sergeant Lockwood’s oily boots not three feet from his head, all I could think about was Calvin and how maybe, someday, this might be him.
Some people have not had it so easy.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Why don’t you get some sleep and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
He steps out of the car, slowly, holding the roof to steady himself. “Thanks,” he says, so softly into his chest that for a moment I’m not sure if I imagined it. He said it, though, and then slammed the door, swiftly, to minimize the noise.
In the morning Zoe finds me sleeping on the couch, my overcoat pulled across my torso, my face poured into a crevice between two seat cushions. She is drinking milk from the carton, sitting on a ledge next to the fireplace, when I open my eyes.
“How come you’re down here?”
“I was too tired to climb back upstairs. Besides,” I start, removing some lint from my tongue, “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“That’s sweet.” She runs a finger along the straight edge of the carton, pulling loose a droplet of milk. She touches it to her lower lip and says, “It was Noah.”
“What?”
“Last night, at school. It was Noah.”
I nod, pulling the collar of my coat closer to my neck.
“Is he in trouble?”
“Mmm.”
“Big trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
She brushes past on her way back to the kitchen, tapping me on the head with the milk carton.
“It was nice of you to get him.”
I watch her standing over the kitchen sink, smoking a cigarette and thinking, about her brother, I presume. Calvin walks in from behind, naked, holding his airplane beneath his right arm.
“Jesus,” I say, rolling from my side onto my back. “Put on some clothes.”
Zoe hands him a banana and he eats it in the doorway, facing me, his tiny penis winking with each bite.
“Why aren’t you dressed?”
Still, he does not say anything; he is chewing, expressionless, as bewildered by me as I am by him. There is only the slappy, sucking sound of banana against inner cheek, like rubbers snapping loose from mud. When he is finished, Zoe stoops and whispers something into his ear and then he disappears.
“What’d you say?” I ask.
“I told him to get dressed.”
“He listens to you.” I feel lightheaded from sitting up too fast. “This is my life: an attorney stuck in the middle of—no, not an attorney: a marriage counselor in the middle of goddam Kansas whose son has taken to ignoring him and listening to his girlfriend …”
“So, now I’m your girlfriend?” asks Zoe, kneeling on the arm of the couch, smiling.
“Perhaps.”
Once she leaves and I have showered and shaved, Calvin and I stop by the office before meeting Kate at Gooland’s. When we arrive she is already drinking coffee and leafing through the local newspaper at a side table. Behind the register there is an open window into the kitchen area and Frankie Larch is staring out, at the dining room, a cigarette angled southward in the corner of his mouth. He nods when our eyes meet and then yells to me that Rob left his first payment the other day. Most of the front wall is repaired, except for some loose caulk seeping from u
nderneath the windows and several exposed islands of cinderblock that will be hidden once the wooden panels are replaced.
“You look tired,” says Kate, as I slide into the booth across from her.
Calvin is not very hungry, but I make him eat some oatmeal and part of my blueberry muffin. He wants to play in the fresh snow with Meg, before it melts or gets “smooshy.” A man in blue coveralls is mixing plaster to spackle along the front wall, leveling the surface before they hang the paneling, and I tell Calvin he can go over and watch as long as he stands to the side and does not bother anyone.
“He’s well behaved,” says Kate.
“Most of the time.”
She breaks off a corner of her muffin, bran, but does not eat it, instead flattening the loose crumbs with her index finger.
“When does he start school?”
“Next fall.”
“And he’ll go around here?”
I nod.
“The schools are okay?”
“They’re fine.”
The waitress comes over and pours us both more coffee, though my cup is half full.
“Well, I would imagine the classes are quite small. That’s good.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you know any of the teachers? I mean, being that you’re kind of like a member of the faculty—”
“It’s totally different. The pre- and primary schools are at the opposite ends of town as the high school. I don’t know any of those folks.”
“Oh. I just—”
“Look, Kate, I appreciate your concern. But when the time comes, we’ll handle it.”
Using a paper napkin, she blots a spilled trail of coffee beneath her saucer.
“If you want me to apologize, I won’t,” she says, suddenly, sternly. “You know, Gordon, I’m not sorry I left. I had to. For me. I am sorry I’ve missed two years of Calvin’s life, and I am sorry if I caused you pain, but I’m not sorry I left.” She looks up, for the first time. “This isn’t an easy thing for me, either, but I’m trying.”
“I can forgive you for leaving me, Kate. But Calvin …”
“I’m not asking for your forgiveness. All I want is a chance to have a relationship with my son. And I can tell you this,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest, “I will have that relationship, with or without your approval.”
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