Good Kids

by Benjamin Nugent

  “I promise I won’t stay here longer than pragmatically necessary,” I said.

  “We want this to be a home to you, Josh,” said Allison. “But we’re going through . . .” She put her hands on the crown of her head. “A weird time. A deeply weird time. We’ll be able to explain very soon.”

  “Quite so,” my father said. He put his hands on the crown of his head, too, making himself symmetrical with Allison. “We hate to be so enigmatic, Josher. But I guess the issue is: What, approximately, are your plans?”

  “How long,” asked Allison, “do you need to stay?”

  “Maybe just tonight?” my father suggested. “And maybe you can articulate what it is you’re doing here?”

  I said that I wanted to stay one night, and visit an old friend in Boston the next day.

  “That sounds just fine,” my father said. “And who, pray tell, is your Boston friend?” As he formed the question, he lowered his arms and made his hands dance before Miles’s face, absentmindedly mesmerizing the animal.

  “Khadijah,” I said. “Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn.”

  My father scooped up the eviscerated duck and threw it. “No mercy, Miles!” he said.

  Miles fell upon his quarry, whipped it back and forth to break its neck. A family feeling mushroomed between us, one of those clouds of intimate silence. Allison must have felt her semi-outsider status, because she straightened the reading material on a coffee table: a mock-up of the article she must have been editing, called “Luxury on the Road to Marfa,” and some literature that was clearly my father’s, De Gaulle and Amnesty International Report: Torture in the ’80s.

  “I broke up with Julie,” I said.

  Allison hugged me. She murmured “sorry” and “oh” and “sweetie” in different combinations in my ear. I couldn’t feel what I’d just said. I knew that the breakup was hovering over me, a piano hung from the ceiling by a fraying rope. It would drop soon, but it hadn’t hit me yet.

  “The engagement is off,” I informed my father, over her shoulder. He paced, holding the book behind his back. “That’s why I need to stay here tonight. Julie and I are over, so tomorrow Khadijah and I are going to have an informal meal.”

  Allison pulled back and stared at me.

  “There’s this falafel truck in Jamaica Plain,” I continued, “that’s actually pretty acclaimed.”

  My father considered the news. “Why don’t the two of us road-trip?” he suggested. Allison redirected her stare, toward him. “You and Khadijah can be informal with each other, I can see an old friend who’s very sick.”

  “Who?” Allison asked.

  “A guy from college you never met, he has cancer. I want to see if he can still hold down a bottle of wine.” He averted his eyes to the green carpet. “Very sad.”

  Allison took my father’s hand and escorted him to the far side of the loft. There followed a clenched-looking discussion to which I was not privy. Here I was, an envoy from the past, and already my father was floating away with me, to the city of Nancy. The way he had paced when I’d mentioned the daughter of his former lover, like a scientist struck by a solution to a problem he’d been slaving over for thirteen years—I could only imagine the effect on my stepmother. But after they were done speaking, Allison began to wipe down the countertop, and my father warned me he expected an early start in the morning.

  That night, failing to sleep on the foldout couch, I heard their fighting: harsh whispers merged in the dark. But by dawn, Allison was stoical, gym-bound, murmuring to herself as she zipped her bag, shook on her hoodie. My father made her coffee, carried it to her on a saucer; she tugged his beard. I waited, pretending to sleep, until they had said good-bye—it was the least I could do to allow them this tiny solitude. I took a shower while my father did his push-ups, his salutes to the sun. It was only 7:30 when we walked seven blocks to a garage—the car had sat in storage for fourteen years, four years longer than Allison and my father had been married. It was an MG convertible, chewing gum green. Allison had a car for daily use, and my father usually didn’t believe in driving, so the MG, her spare, an old gift from Bruce and Merrie, was never touched. You could tell by looking at it. It projected dormant lust, like a sleeping beauty in a tower waiting to be roused. And it gave every appearance of immortality. No rust, despite a long hibernation. No stains on the leather. Only a layer of dust so thick I was able to draw a heart on the hood.

  We coasted from the garage in the Meatpacking District up the Henry Hudson into Sunday as the sky shed its pink skin and turned blue. It wasn’t yet November.

  “Maybe we’ll have lunch in the North End. New Haven’s better for pizza, but we’ll be in Boston before noon at the speed we’re going now.”

  I nodded sleepily. “The Italians aren’t really about breakfast, as a culture.”

  “You said it.” This point of accord wedged something open. I could almost hear it.

  “I’m not sure whether I want more children, Joshy,” he said. “Allison would like to have a pair of them, is the issue.”

  The oaks on either side of the highway tried to pet the car. We were on the flank of Harlem now, with the river on our left, screened by leaves.

  “Your stepmother and I went for a stroll in the park a couple years ago. We got to the top of this hill, and it was raining. She said, ‘You must have two children with me or you have to leave me,’ and I said okay, we could have some kids. But I don’t respond well to ultimatums. I might like to move to the South of France, very soon. I’m a creative animal, and I want to write a book of essays. I mean, hell, I might decide to go to Africa, write it there.”

  “Have you not been able to focus on the essays the way you’d like over the last ten years?”

  “We’re not all musical gentlemen like yourself.” He shot me a furious look that smoldered away in two seconds. “Some of us working people, we have responsibilities that we often find prevent us from concentrating on the artistic pursuit at hand. Or romantic pursuits, I might add—Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn! A hubbub, after all these years.” He grinned, involuntarily, and my happiness stunned me.

  “I’ve worked,” he continued. “I’ve raised children. And, now, to speak truthfully, Son, drawing up new additions for the house is a lot easier than conceptualizing some sort of lyrical screed. Allison doesn’t give a shit what I do in my spare time, but she doesn’t like it when I get into bed talking about my objections to rich people and excessive breeding. When I have to tell the truth, I become shitty to people, and I want to be nice. How do you think about shit honestly, and still be nice? When I actually let myself look at how shit is, I either have to forget about it and go draw some new gables on graph paper or I can stay in it, I can root in it, like a Scorsese movie, or maybe more a Van Gogh, and be fucked up in the head, and mean. I want to be nice. So how do I be an essayist?” He paused for breath. “Sorry. I’m going off in an unbecoming manner. Sorry.”

  He took a joint from his backpack, which I held in my lap. He pressed the joint to the dash lighter, elbows on the wheel, got it started. He offered me a drag, but I turned him down.

  “I’m too self-conscious to be stoned around family,” I explained.

  “Oh, that’s psychologically interesting.” He finished an exhalation. “See, I prize my relationship with Allison. There’s also the little problem of what I’d do for work without Bruce.” I knew that the tiny nonprofit he’d founded after we got back from the island had continued to benefit from Allison’s father’s support, but I didn’t know whether new donors had been found. “We’re a pretty hungry animal, even though it’s just me and a couple interns writing reports on Zimbabwean farming.

  “I suppose,” he said, and dragged again, “the idea of a couple of little girls running around me in circles shouting ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ that is somewhat appealing. But I’m scared beyond reason. I’m fifty-eight years old. It’s the rest of my life, another kid meandering through whatever fields of bullshit he’ll meander through, and finally fetching
up on college after the whole thing and needing so much money, which would leave me begging Bruce for more of it.” He turned over the joint in his fingers, watching it burn.

  “It’s a good thing, just moving through the world as a solitary grown-up,” I said speculatively. “Maybe you want to chill for a while. Tell me something.” I worked up my courage. “Did you like having children the first time?”

  “Oh yes. We were so starry-eyed about you and your sister. The children of the future. The horrible poems I wrote about you, when you were a baby! I still have them somewhere.”

  “What about— Didn’t you say you were going to write an essay about how destructive having children had become, or how destructive we figured out it was, after it was too late, or whatever?”

  “Sure, but we didn’t think about that then. We loved the mission of making you, so much that we couldn’t see how—how jagged, shall we say, a combination we were, your mother and I. Well, your mother did see. She didn’t want to get married, you know, she just wanted children, and she was thirty-one, which in those days . . . And there I was. Wait, oops. Did you know that?”

  I looked at the cherry of the joint. I hadn’t.

  “Oh. Fuck. Sorry. Anyway, I was the one who said we had to marry. I was the one who said we had to make a life together, with our children. I saw it, it was a vision, very clear. That’s probably why things didn’t work. But it was just kind of dangling before me, like an icicle.”

  I almost reached across the seat to embrace him. I didn’t know why.

  “How do you envision me proceeding?” I asked, a minute later. “From this point in my life?”

  “I can see you with Khadijah,” he said. “But I can’t be objective.”

  “Why not?”

  He hesitated. “Have you ever read that John Donne poem about the flea? John Donne’s lost his lover. They’ve split up but they’re hanging out together, he and his lover, and he sees this flea on the table between them. And, man, does he covet the soul of that flea. Insect, he says, you’re the only place our blood can mix, you who have bitten us both.” He nodded. “That’s you and Khadijah—the flea, in a positive sense. The last place Nancy and I are together.”

  It was then that the engine made a sound that communicated, to some intuitive organ in each of us capable of interpreting the protestations of machines, that it was helplessly sick, and wanted us to know it was going to die. It let out a parched screech that descended slowly, operatically, to a nauseated growl. It was the most human sound I had ever heard from an expensive car. Brothers, it said, I am melting. It faded quickly into near silence.

  “This is fascinating,” my father said. “I mean, we were supposed to put oil in the engine.” The floor beneath our feet began to quake. “Allison was being a little hysterical about it. She’s hysterical, as a tendency, sometimes.”

  I stared at him. Even stoned, he could read the question on my face: Had he cheated?

  “She and I are doing fine,” he said. “Being responsible to your partner comes a little easier at this age.” He threw the roach into the road. “The proper course now is to reach a gas station before the Hindenburg here bursts into flames and the two of us burn in a German car. That’d be an ironic death for a nice Judeo-Hibernian lad like yourself.”

  “Is that irony?” I asked. Even under the present circumstances, it was thrilling to correct him.

  “I’m not quite sure that I’ve retained my faculties with regard to literary distinctions right now,” he said. We were moving slowly, down an exit ramp. The grass was unruly on either side. Postwar houses rose before us, uniform in shape, modest in size, painted shoot green, deep tan, every shade of decent stationery. We came to a stop at the same moment the car ceased its muttering altogether. A man sitting on his porch began to speak to us in Italian, his hands stroking his belly.

  “Inglese?” my father asked.

  At this, a tall, skinny man wearing glasses and overalls emerged on a porch on the other side of the street. He had gray curls, little, silvery granny glasses, and lawns of salt-and-pepper hair on his shoulders.

  “This guy doesn’t speak English,” he called to my father. He said something dismissive to his nonanglophone neighbor in Italian. “Your car is smoking, sir?”

  My father parked the convertible in front of the man’s house. I grabbed the backpack and vaulted out as he idled the engine and guided the roof back into place. Once my father had turned the engine off and the smoke had stopped billowing, the man gave us lemonade in his yard while we waited for the tow.

  The man’s son was visiting. He was my age, short and fair with a braided ponytail, a first-year in med school. He was his father’s pride—you could tell by the way the old man’s gaze tracked him from his perch on the stoop, as he poured us seconds of lemonade from an orange cooler, and brought them to us with a physician’s air of significance and concern. They gave no indication that they noticed my father was stoned. They seemed to see before them a mild and gentle man who thanked them profusely and remarked on the beauty of the park and the trees, who told them that this landscape was making a profound impression on him and that he was seriously considering a move from Tribeca to a neighborhood like this one, in which to raise two more children with his wife. They agreed it was a good idea.

  “Excuse me, friends,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I’m a proud dad and I need to brag. My son here is a musician.” There was sun shining on his beard, and the wavering leaves made patterns on his forehead. “He wrote part of a song that was on a Pepsi commercial.” His smile was real. “It was broadcast in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.”

  The tow truck came and dragged the MG to a repair shop. We walked a half mile to one of the northernmost outposts of the 4 train, where the wooden platform was speckled with fangs of glass. My father stared down at the platform and tilted his head, like a curious boy.

  “Am I just stoned?” he asked. “Or is this subway platform beautiful?”

  The possibility of deflating him was too seductive. “You’re stoned,” I said. I immediately regretted it. His face collapsed.

  “You mean it’s not beautiful?” He shrugged. “Ah well. I’ll stay up here and see what can be done for Allison’s car. It has sentimental value for her, I believe. But don’t wait for me, Son.”

  “I might as well hop on a train.” My voice was colder than I’d intended. I was too focused on falafel in Boston to see that the convertible’s death had been my opportunity to mend fences with my father. We might have fixed the natural bond between us that had begun to fray in Gaia Foods. We might have talked about the new-kids concept, had a calmer, seated discussion, over a pizza in New Haven. I could have explained the delay to Khadijah; she would have thought it was sweet of me to lend my stoned father a hand with a car. Instead I rode the 4 train back to Manhattan. I climbed the stairs at Grand Central, rode Metro-North to Stamford. Rented a squash-shaped yellow Daewoo from the Stamford Avis. Some part of me knew that the breakup with Julie was going to become real to me soon, and that if I could keep moving—keep pursuing—the moment it struck me would be delayed.

  It was only outside Bridgeport that I realized I still had my father’s backpack. It might have had his wallet in it, or something else, experience suggested, that was very much private property. As I drove with my left hand, I searched in it with my right, unable to stop myself. First I fished out a Ziploc bag of joints, and then a manila envelope full of something slightly heavier than paper.

  Because I was running late, now, it was only when I was waiting in line at the Mass Pike toll that I opened the envelope. The Polaroids were not of my father and a school chum; they were twelve-, thirteen-year-old pictures of my father and Nancy. Never posed together, they had taken pictures of each other rather than allow an interloper to photograph the two of them. In three shots the cabin loomed behind them. In two more the Berkshire Hills, in another the dunes of the Cape. I thought of Khadijah and me, by the Watts Towers.

&
nbsp; Seeing a sick friend from the college days: a typical Linus Paquettian lie. But there was some Truth with a capital T in his story about the man on death’s door. Nancy was a companion from the past who was mostly memory to him now, and she would be gone for good if he had another set of children. Like the mortally sick, she was fading. I could see my father’s plan: Arrive at her office with memories in a sack; wrest her away from her new life for an afternoon; keep the central tale of his life alive another few years.

  I thought of my father reaching for the icicle in front of him, and I thought of him reaching out and giving the envelope of old pictures to Nancy, and I thought of the napkins in my pocket, Tom, Myra, Julie 2. I knew this was important, somehow; but the tollbooth was upon me, and it was time to take my ticket from the machine, to make up time on the Pike. I had an appointment with a goddess from my childhood, Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn.

  11.

  The Mansion

  I was a proud son of Massachusetts, but I’d forgotten what Cambridge was like. Packs of cars drew me in, enslaved me, husbanded me into tunnels. I pined for the straightforward hell of the freeway system, pounded the neck of the Daewoo’s meek little steering wheel. After two involuntary trips down Storrow Drive, I shot past Khadijah before I spotted her, and realized that I was on Bow Street, our agreed-upon meeting place. She was able to dodge across an alley I faintly remembered for a store with hand-cranked ice cream and wave me toward a crooked little lozenge of asphalt wedged between a Harvard memorabilia shop and an institute dedicated to the prevention of nuclear war. Here, I was allowed to stop long enough for her to get in the Daewoo.

  She toppled into the passenger seat dressed, I noted with joy, for something grander than food truck fare. She wore a green corduroy dress that rounded her body, and a purple cardigan that made her look plumed, a lost tropical bird.

  From the beginning, our attempts to reach the falafel truck were dependent on her Bostonian’s intuition for the landscape. My cell phone, which had a map feature, had run out of batteries way back on the 84.