by Gabriel Roth
When she’s made two grilled cheeses for me and a half sandwich for herself, we carry the plates and soup bowls into the dining room. I return for paper towels and silverware and we sit down on opposite sides of the table, smiling at the familiar situation and the unfamiliar setting. She blows on a spoonful of soup and says, “Well, your dad called.”
“You talked to him?” As far as I know, my parents hadn’t spoken in seven years. “How was that?”
“Honestly, it was hard,” she says. She sets the spoon back in her bowl without tasting the soup. “He had his friendly manner, and he asked how I was doing, and I didn’t know what to tell him. And then he asked if I’d been in touch with you! As though you were a friend from school or something like that.”
“Did he say anything about having dinner with me?”
“He said that he had offered you this job—pitched you, was the way he said it—and that you had turned it down, and that you were making a big mistake and I should talk to you about it. He said here was your big opportunity for lightning to strike twice, and you were about to miss it.”
“Did you tell him to go fuck himself?”
Mom frowns at the language. “No, I didn’t,” she says. “But I told him you were smarter than both of your parents combined and you could make your own decisions.”
I make a noise that attempts to thank her without endorsing the insult to her own intelligence. “If he bothers you again, tell him to call me,” I say. “There’s no reason you should get dragged into this crap.”
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “I’m not scared of your dad.”
After dinner I check out the rest of the house—too many surfaces, not enough objects to rest or hang on them—and retire to the guest bedroom. I’m almost certain I’m the first person to stay in this room. On the verge of sleep, my mind snags on Mom’s frightened admonition about a prenuptial agreement. I know she’s trying to prevent my life from being sabotaged the way hers was. But I have to believe it won’t be that way when Maya and I divorce. We will be reasonable, sympathetic, adult. I wish I could be certain. Will we be trapped by bitterness and regret? Will we be able to find one another through the thicket of hostility, to reach out and clasp hands and say, Here I am, I loved you once?
Victoria, who works with my mom, is the first to arrive. She brings her son Carlos, aged ten months, fleshy and grumpy. We sit in the living room in front of the big picture window, and my mom fetches a bag of Tostitos and a bowl of salsa. (I worry that Victoria will feel patronized by the quasi-Mexican snack, but she dips happily.) When the doorbell rings again, my mom is bouncing Carlos on her lap, so I volunteer to answer it.
Stacey Oberfell is standing in the doorway. “Look at you!” she says. “The prodigal son returns!” The adjective seems uncalled for. “So let me see you,” she says, stepping inside and appraising the effects of eight years on my physiognomy. “Well, you’re looking more and more like your dad.”
In the living room, Mom and Stacey embrace, and Stacey meets Victoria, and we all sit down on the big matching couches and armchairs. “Here we are,” Stacey says. “The house that Eric built. Or bought, anyway.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know how to build it,” I say. “So how are things, Stacey? How’s the family?”
“Everyone’s great. Bronwen and Pete were so jealous when I told them I was going to see you. Bronwen’s training to be a nurse, we’re all real proud of her.” I would like to learn whether she has a boyfriend and if she ever mentions me, but I don’t ask. “Pete graduated college last year, and now he’s in officer candidate school, if you can believe that.”
The thought of fearful nine-year-old Pete in uniform is hard to accept, especially with troops massing in Kuwait. “And what about Gary?” I say, as if Gary and I were peers or buddies. A sudden worry: Have they divorced? Did I hear about it and forget?
“Oh, he’s great,” she says. “His practice is doing real well, and we moved to a place in Aurora Hills, a real nice place. Not as nice as this place, obviously”—she gestures at the huge empty space above our heads—“but still real nice.”
I had thought that membership in a twelve-step program guaranteed a crowd at your birthday party, but there is no sign of a sponsor or any fellow addicts-in-recovery. I imagine my mom at a meeting, sitting alone at the back of the room, next to a big urn of coffee. It’s strange to be the only man here, a feeling compounded by the fact that Victoria is probably a few years younger than me. I am aware of some subtle pressure of expectations, as though I’m supposed to produce something. The conversation seems lost in the massive house—or maybe it’s the disconnectedness of the guests: Victoria from work, Stacey from long ago, me from biology.
Carlos begins to cry, and Mom passes him back to Victoria with a flustered look, as though she must have done something wrong. Victoria casually takes out her breast and attaches Carlos to it while I stare at the floor. “So tell me about your life,” Stacey says. “Any more million-dollar companies? You’ve got to tell us about the next one so we can invest!”
“Uh, no, I’m not really working on anything commercial right now,” I say. “I’m still doing some programming, but it’s mostly open source.”
Stacey smiles and nods to convey that she has no idea what I mean and doesn’t want me to explain. “Well, we’re all real proud of you,” she says. “I said to my kids, See, I told you you should be learning computers.”
“It sounds like they’re doing good, though,” I say. “I mean, there’s a big nursing shortage, right?”
“Oh, sure,” Stacey says, bored. “So Margo—how does it feel to be the big five-oh?”
“Well, I feel…,” my mom says, and then takes a pause that stretches out like the blank terrain visible through the window. Then she remembers her lines: “I’m just so grateful to be here. There have been so many hard things, and now,” smiling at me, “I’m here in this beautiful house, and I’m back at work, and I haven’t taken a drink or a pill in one year, four months, and six days, and thanks to you guys and God I’m on the right path.” By the end of this litany she sounds cheerful.
“We can all celebrate that, right?” Stacey says, as though distinguishing it from something else. The moment seems to call for a toast, but only Victoria and I have glasses, both of them filled with Diet Coke.
“So is it time for the presents?” says Victoria. “And is there maybe some kind of cake?” She gives me a twinkly smile, and I realize too late that I’m here as a host rather than a guest, responsible for the apparatus of the festivities.
“Uh, no, I, uh, I didn’t get a cake,” I say. Stacey’s face takes on a look of private hopes borne out. I can’t look at my mom.
“We’ve got presents, anyway,” says Victoria. Long ago it was decided that my mother liked pumpkins, and that gifts for her should involve pumpkin iconography: her kitchen clock is in the shape of a pumpkin, and her apron is decorated with pumpkins. I suspect that, for my mom, the pumpkin theme’s chief function is to minimize the amount of time other people spend thinking about what she might enjoy. Victoria has brought a ceramic jack-o’-lantern whose black eyes and mouth are cute rather than scary. As a child I felt strongly that jack-o’-lanterns were a corruption of the pumpkin idea, belonging to Halloween rather than to my mother’s birthday, but I don’t remember Mom expressing any feelings on the issue. She is more affected by Victoria’s card, which bears a printed poem titled “To a Woman I Admire.”
Stacey’s gift is a framed print, a painting of children making sand castles, that calls attention to the house’s acres of barren wall. Every minute or so I reexamine the knot of bad feeling at the back of my head and remember the cake thing. My hope is that my gift will redeem me, at least in part: a gold and topaz brooch, more expensive than anything else my mom wears but not so ostentatious as to be out of place. She extracts it from the little square box. “Oh, Eric,” she says. “Oh, it’s so pretty!” She affixes it to her sweater carefully, squeezing the pin between threads. �
��It’s the most beautiful thing I own.” She is trying to make me feel better about the cake, and I appreciate the attempt, although it only makes my failure more vivid.
Nothing has been planned for the rest of the afternoon. Was this my responsibility too? Drinks at some nearby Applebee’s is out. If I could leave for half an hour I could get a cake at the supermarket and then stop at Blockbuster and pick up a movie about four middle-aged women who learn to build fulfilling lives without men. Everyone works to find neutral subjects and eats chips and salsa until all the chips large enough to convey salsa are gone.
“So your mom’s been telling us all about your new girlfriend,” Victoria says, giving me a look that is like flirting but with everything sexual or romantic stripped out. Young mothers do this sometimes, mechanically recapitulating the forms of a ritual they’ve outgrown.
“Nothing too personal, I hope,” I say.
“Oh, she just says you’re madly in love,” Victoria says, drawing out the last three words wickedly. I dodge the topic with an embarrassed shrug, out of fear that my filial affection will seem inadequate by comparison. If it were Maya’s birthday I’d have made sure there was a cake.
After another hour the shadows of the hills outside begin to spread, and the guests take this as permission to leave. On her way out, Stacey says, “I’ll get your email from your mom and give it to the kids. I’m sure they’d love to know what you’re up to.” Finally Mom and I are alone.
“So that was nice,” she says.
“I’m sorry I didn’t plan better,” I say.
“Oh no, well, no, don’t worry about it,” she says. “I don’t think anyone really likes birthday cake anyway, do they? And this,” touching the brooch, “is really special.”
Soon the central heating shudders on, and we order Domino’s and watch the news: two kids are dead in a house fire in Colorado Springs, and someone forged the evidence that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger. I try to come up with things to say about the stories, but I keep thinking about my mother sitting here alone, with a frozen dinner instead of a pizza. Tomorrow she will drive me to the airport. I had imagined some kind of dull social calendar revolving around book group and NA meetings, but there is no evidence that any such events have been skipped or rescheduled on account of my visit. The house: I thought it was the right thing but it’s too big, too empty, a consolation prize. Mom watches TV while I stare out at the last traces of light, barely enough to distinguish the hills from the sky.
Maya comes downstairs in her jacket. I am carrying plastic bags containing a six-pack of beer, a loaf of French bread, and two different kinds of cheese. When she appears in the doorway I quash the impulse to pick her up and spin her around because many small people dislike being picked up, even affectionately, and this probably goes double for small people who have been sexually abused. I’ve advised her to snack, since Cynthia has a weird metabolism and no sense of ordinary physical appetites; she once served six people a dinner consisting of nothing but roasted yams. As we walk over there I try to tell Maya about my mom’s birthday party. It’s a delicate task, because I don’t want to pierce the bubble of sadness that’s been sitting on my chest ever since. The cake debacle I omit entirely.
“It’s as if she’s on the moon out there,” I say. “A hundred identical houses, just far enough apart that you never see another human being.”
She stops to push a piece of sidewalk jetsam to the curb with her foot, with a care that seems protective of both the trash and the foot. “That’s not how I think of the moon,” she says.
Cynthia and Maya were introduced at the party, but this is their first meeting with me in common. As they greet each other at the door, they project the knowingness one uses with friends of friends, to announce I’ve heard good things about you. Cynthia leads us up the stairs and into the kitchen, where Sam is sitting at the table, slouched low in her chair. She doesn’t stand when we come in. I recognize her as the sartorially butch/physically femme half of that couple at the party: slight and pretty, with a thin, unformed face and tight black curls. She could almost pass as a boy but for her creamy skin and the platinum stud like a mole in her upper lip. The trend among San Francisco lesbians is to stake out a position on the border between butchdom and transgenderhood, where pronoun choices are fraught and unpredictable. (Cynthia has explained this to me with the earnest pedantry of someone displaying recently acquired knowledge.) For a straight man, lesbianism is like communism: utopian in theory, disappointing in practice. Maya and I sit down and open beers as Cynthia pushes some kale around on the stove.
“So how did you guys meet?” Maya asks Sam.
“Mutual friends,” says Sam with a self-deprecating roll of the eyes, as though this were universally agreed to be the dullest and least promising way to meet.
“And you guys met here!” Cynthia says. “I’m so proud!” She turns and holds out her beer for us to clink. I would toast more enthusiastically were it not for the botched nature of that meeting. It was here that I was introduced to her, fixed her a cocktail, failed to speak to her. This is where the whole thing started, and now it’s where the end is about to begin.
When Cynthia sets down the plates of kale and green beans, I try to catch Maya’s eye so we can share a humorous look, but she’s too polite for that. We start to eat, and there’s a little pause in which we savor our food and wonder what we’re going to talk about. Maya, who is professionally skilled at meeting people, begins questioning Cynthia, starting with her job but probing backward into her childhood and forward into her ambitions. I remember having that intense, benevolent scrutiny trained on me, and I miss being the object of her curiosity. Maya’s skill at interrogation gets results, as usual: I didn’t know Cynthia was thinking about training to be a nurse practitioner, or that she sometimes considers moving back to Denver. In anticipation of this evening I’ve nurtured a fantasy in which Maya and Cynthia become friends and the three of us form a group with me at the center. In reality, though, their obvious amity threatens to unstop and blend separate vats of emotion in me, a disconcerting prospect. I tear off some French bread and spread a dollop of soft cheese over it.
As she fetches a second round of beers, Cynthia announces that armed National Guard troops are posted at either end of the Bay Bridge again. They come and go according to geopolitical weather patterns indecipherable to civilians.
“So now we’re going to invade Iraq,” Sam says. Her tone is jaded, almost bored. At some point an invasion has become inevitable.
“I keep thinking I missed something,” says Cynthia. “Like, didn’t some other people just attack us? And so now we’re going to invade a completely different country, just because they’ve got nuclear weapons? I mean, Canada’s got nuclear weapons, right? Are we going to invade Canada?”
“Yeah, but they don’t have oil,” Sam says. Her arm rests on the back of Cynthia’s chair, and she strokes the back of Cynthia’s neck while she talks.
Maya is knowledgeable and eloquent on the subject of the looming war, and Cynthia and Sam are soon reduced to echoes. I’m the least politically astute person at the table: I’ve just spent two and a half years preoccupied with the challenges of personalized online marketing. I didn’t vote in the 2000 election—Bill and I were too busy to register, and California was a lock anyway, and neither of the candidates seemed especially inspiring or scary. What interested me most was that the election was essentially a tie, and that the balance was tipped by poor interface design. Bill and I laughed about it for thirty seconds and then went back to work. As the conversation becomes an exercise in emphatic agreement—the invasion is a done deal, an oil grab, a sop to the energy services companies, a fuck-you to international opinion, a narcissistic projection of imperial power, an Oedipal acting-out—I find myself missing Demographic of One. For thirty-five months Bill and I made two dozen decisions every day: which protocols to use, which features to build, what to do first, what to skip. (Bill usually deferred to me on design
and won the technical arguments on the merits. I changed his mind exactly twice, and in fifty years I’ll still remember how.) A discussion like this one, that gets its strength from the fact that everyone shares a position, would have been an unthinkable waste of resources. All I wanted during that time was a girlfriend, and now, in a striking proof of the ineradicability of human loneliness, I’ve got this great girlfriend and I miss working sixteen hours a day with Bill Fleig.
“And it’s really convenient for them that 9/11 happens right after Bush becomes president,” Sam is saying, with the half-ironic smile of the conspiracy theorist.
“So what about the WMDs?” I say. Sam gives a derisive little snort. I don’t think I’ve ever used the phrase WMDs before tonight, and it sounds phony and stupid. “Obviously the president is an idiot. But that doesn’t change the fact that maybe they’ve got these weapons.”
Maya is unruffled. “That’s what UN inspections are for,” she says. “Look, this is the same thing the government has always done. They create these villains to scare us, and then they exploit that fear.”
I don’t want to challenge her, but the prevailing and totally unearned confidence sets me on edge. There’s too much we don’t know, and even if we had access to all the classified intelligence, the situation involves too many interdependent variables to allow anyone to predict outcomes with any confidence. “I’m not saying we should invade,” I say. Cynthia and Sam are shuttling their eyes back and forth. “I just think we need to be wary of getting into a little festival of certainty. Can’t we admit that we don’t really know?”
Maya sets down her knife and fork. “You can reserve judgment as long as you like,” she says. “And, you know, congratulations, you’ve won the gold medal for scrupulous empiricism or whatever. But meanwhile you’re abandoning the battlefield to the other side.”