Josh lifted the box from under his father’s arm, and Adam noticed that he’d been wrong about the alphabetizing. Books A—J, yes. But it wasn’t Josh’s handwriting after all; it was Denise’s. Not Josh’s books, but theirs—his and Denise’s—from their last move to the city. A borrowed box. Yes, that seemed more right, he thought as Josh went inside again, appearing a moment later in the room above. His mother had been an alphabetizer for sure.
“When’s Henry coming home?” Adam yelled when Josh reappeared.
The boy stood in the doorway, looking around at the boxes on the sidewalk, the empty truck parked across the street. Not much stuff in the life of a nineteen-year-old, even this one. Josh, hands on hips, a handsome boy.
“He usually gets out of work at seven.”
“So we have time for dinner.”
Josh smiled and stood there. So much of Denise in him, in his dusty reddened skin, the shape of his nose and the color of his eyes. A handsome boy; not stunning, but the kind of boy, Adam supposed, a man of twenty-six would cherish. There was something missing, though, of the cockiness Josh had as a youth, the brazen confidence and imagination. Something had hurt him a little, and Adam could only guess that it was love. What else could it be? He could only hope it wasn’t Henry, that it was some other man whom Adam hadn’t heard of. Surely there were some of those; Josh never confided in his father, certainly about these things, and Adam would not have known what to say in any case. A man breaking another man’s heart—what advice did he have for that? He merely hoped that this Henry was a good man, a kind and unclever man, the sort of man you settle for. That he loved Josh a little more than he was loved back.
“Does Henry keep beer in the fridge?” he asked, walking toward the door.
Josh stepped out of his way with a cynical expression. “No,” he said. “But I do.”
“Good. I need one,” Adam said, walking inside.
“And one for me!” he heard Josh shouting. But Adam didn’t go straight to the refrigerator. This was his first time in the flat alone, the first without Josh leading him from room to room explaining their functions ("and this is the bedroom" had been his favorite, gesturing to the clean white comforter as both father and son turned the same shade of red); like a child dressed up for company, the tour had been sweet and unconvincing. Something was not being said, but what more could be hidden? Two men in a Victorian flat: one teenage Josh and one much older Henry Wong, the son of a disgraced city planner—could there possibly be more to the story? He pictured the two of them that morning before his visit—Henry in his suit and tie and Josh in sweats—working quickly, taking photos off the walls and stuffing them into a filing cabinet. Adam opened the filing cabinet: nothing but files. He imagined them turning book spines inward on the bookshelf, thinking he wouldn’t notice; books that might point to some other portion of their lives. He pulled out the misordered books he found: old college literary theory, novels (not his own). In the medicine cabinet, just antibiotics and eye cream. In the refrigerator, just beer, leftovers, and half an onion swelling with moisture on the cold shelf. He took two beers and popped the caps. He sipped his beer, relieved.
“Hey, do I get a beer?”
Josh was standing in the kitchen, watching him.
“Here,” Adam said, handing it over. “And here’s to your new place. Here’s to you and Henry.”
Josh clinked bottles with him without a word and swallowed his beer greedily. Then he looked at his father with such precision that it made the older man shiver. It occurred to Adam that he might have this all wrong: What if their roles had been switched while he wasn’t looking? Then Josh would be the careful, worrying one, searching for a clue to heartache. And his father would be the irresponsible one, the headstrong man making bad choices, keeping old secrets. Maybe Josh thought his own life was fine, stable, with his youth and this new love to steer him, but that his father’s might topple at any moment. A lonely widower in San Francisco. A man who’d lied and fought to save his wife, and then could not even save her.
“You think Mom would like Henry?” Josh asked at last.
“Why do you ask that?” Adam heard himself giving this careful, parental answer.
His son looked at him as if it were obvious. He said, “I wonder all the time what she’d think. I hated it, how she always had opinions about what I did. It’s not like I miss that. But I guess I was so used to knowing.”
“I never learned to figure out what she’d like or wouldn’t.”
“You think she’d disapprove.”
Yes, Adam thought. Of course she would. Of course she’d want you to pick your life so carefully, because of how it sticks to you. But he said, “No, of course she’d love him.”
Adam looked over at a picture on the kitchen table: Josh and Henry at the beach, grinning. It was a photograph like this that had first made Adam understand about his son: on the wall of his college dorm, in a nice frame, just a photo of Josh and a friend. Some young man he didn’t know, tall and blond, standing beside his son. Nothing overt. But something about their smiles, something about the expense to which Josh had gone for that frame, its careful placement, had made everything quite clear.
But his son was speaking: “I know what I’m doing, Dad.”
“I never said you didn’t,” Adam said.
“I love him, Dad.”
Oh, that isn’t what I want to hear, Adam thought as he smiled. He patted his son’s hand, looking at his face, which was so pained and unsure. It turns out that doesn’t matter at all.
He thought briefly of Denise, as Josh must have been doing. It happened all the time—whenever he threw away her junk mail, or used her old shampoo or answered the phone and realized it would never be her. The image that came to him was not one of the stock images he kept of Denise—posed for his memory in the kitchen, in the shower, in the bedroom smiling—this one was of her arriving wearily from Rome through that airport gate. The tired expression and blond-streaked hair all out of place, the odd Italian jacket, the overstuffed purse weighing down one shoulder. She came out of the gate and he saw her, not knowing whether he should hug her, and then he rushed forward anyway and held her and she whispered in his ear, I’m coming back, Adam. Not that she was back, but that she was coming back; she was still on her way. She slept for days after that. The image was of Denise at the gate, so exhausted and unpretty and old, longing to fall into his arms. Not love, not passion. Just the sense to know that he was all she had. It was the most he could ask for.
After Rome they had only three years together. Had he known, he would have quit his stalled novel and taken her around the world, indulged her with presents of gold and diamonds, fed her dangerous foods and filled her up with wine. He would have talked her into sex in a minaret over Istanbul, no birth control, just the two of them the way they’d been as young people back in Berkeley. A passionate gamble, little chances taken again. Rather than hold her close and hoard her, he would have pushed her out of airplanes, screaming happily; made her swim with sharks; run with her across a war-torn nation— he would have taken every risk because why not? What worse thing could happen than what was already going to happen? Of course he had not known. So, instead, he trapped her at home as much as he could; he kept her safe, watching TV while their son was off at college. She would fall asleep on the couch with her mouth open, and he would lead her into bed. Years passed like this.
Then the call, the police. He had been in his office, struggling over a new novel long overdue at the publisher, and the phone’s light began to blink. A phone for the deaf, something he had purchased to keep himself undistracted, but it didn’t help at all; he always watched it as it blinked, made its silent plea. This time, a rare time, he picked it up. A torrent of information, carefully given to him in a list. It was easy to take as a list: first an accident, then trapped inside the car, and no not alive, and you can identify her here or at the morgue. He took it all very calmly, packing his papers and getting his car from the lot, dri
ving through traffic to the Headlands road and even taking note of the view from the Golden Gate Bridge. A hawk hovering in the hot blue. Because it wasn’t true, of course. Even when he saw her on the hill, it wasn’t true; on that beautiful high point with the trees all touching his shoulders, patting him with every breeze that blew. The men had just laid her out on a plaid blanket on an incline of grass, her arms and legs outstretched not in the way a person would lie, but in the way a child would draw a person. A hand bent the wrong way. The men were very proud of their effort, the hours wrenching her from the car, the careful way they had arranged her broken body before taking her to the ambulance. They presented his wife, and stood in a row, looking at him as if he should applaud. He smiled and felt bizarre. Denise, wearing her new jewelry of broken glass, the gleaming strands of hair caught on her lips, and a tree of blood on her forehead. What he felt upon seeing her was rage—and not at some abstract Fate, not at the neglectful sun which moved, unstopping, in the sky, but at her. At his wife and this new betrayal. The thoughtless dead.
Adam was sitting at the kitchen table, caught in a box of gray light, with his son staring at him again. Both of their beers were empty. Yes, his son was the worrier and he was the one on the edge.
“Let’s go,” he said, and Josh’s face lit up as it had when he was a little boy.
They were quickly up and outside, dizzy from the beer, breathing in the city air, colder now that the fog had settled. Adam was wearing one of Henry’s coats, brown wool, expensive, wonderful to feel. Josh was beside him, walking quietly with a little smile. Such a bad life?
“That cafe down there,” Josh said, pointing down the block where Adam could see only an empty metal chair on the sidewalk. “Henry was in there in the earthquake.”
“Really?”
“There’s a crack in the asphalt—look, see, here.”
“There’s a lot of those.”
“He said he was reading and he fell over. Not from the quake— from the surprise. Henry’s a little jumpy.”
Adam had been sleeping that morning of the quake, heard a crash, then run into the living room to see all the awful crystal figurines, ones Denise’s mother gave them years ago, falling to the floor. A poltergeist seemed to be picking them up, one by one, and dropping each of them with a tiny shattering. Adam was living alone in the house by then, and felt a particular joy at the violence of that day. Then he had called Eli. He didn’t know why; Adam was always calling Eli those days, trying to get him to chat, emote, anything. He had phoned him to tell him that an earthquake had happened but not to worry. Some of Denise’s crystal had broken, that’s all. Eli was silent on the other line.
Josh was still talking. “I think we were all a little jumpy. I hit my head on a lamp.”
The calls to Eli had grown important to Adam, ever since the day of her death when he found himself phoning the poor man from the scene of the accident. Adam had stood on that hillside looking at her body, enraged by his wife’s departure, by this eviction from his own life, and grabbed a police phone from a car. He got Eli on the line and that was when he felt it—as he heard Eli’s soft hello—felt what had happened to him. Adam began to sob, telling his wife’s old lover everything, every gruesome detail that he saw—her earlobes darkened with blood, her eyelids and jaw so stiff—wishing Eli could be there to embrace him. Eli would understand. Eli would hold him and whisper the kinds of words Denise would have offered, comforting words, lovers’ words, because Adam felt somehow that he and Eli were the closest thing to lovers; that now, with her gone, they were left together. Yet Eli had said nothing for a long time, until, before hanging up the phone, simply: “Thank you for telling me.”
“You want to eat there?” Adam asked.
“What, here?” Josh said, concerned. They had reached the cafe, which Josh mentioned had suffered only two broken plates in the earthquake. “Crepes or something?” The door was propped open, a dog leashed to a rail outside. Within, two women sat sipping coffee.
Adam said, “Crepes sound good.” He was trying to be flexible, to be anything for his son.
But he thought once again of what he’d done wrong. Perhaps he shouldn’t have packed up her equipment, her charts and textbooks and terrifying logs of stars. Perhaps he shouldn’t have given so many away to colleagues, or sold the rest, keeping only a few beautiful drawings for himself and Josh. Perhaps he should have done what he’d longed to do: buried it all with her. The way King Tut had been buried with his ships, his chariots and dogs, and three hundred servants for all the tasks he needed done in hell. If King Tut was to have tasks, Adam thought, then Denise would as well: to view the stars from the other side of the firmament, to look down on that etched globe of light. Or no, he thought; it would be an Egyptian hell, where the sky is a goddess. The sky is Nut spread naked above the earth, and so Denise would sit above her in a sling. An exalted servant, Denise would pick the stars, those burrs, from the goddess’s weary back.
“No,” Josh said after a moment. “If you’re paying, I want Thai.”
“There’s Thai in this neighborhood?”
Josh laughed. “Isn’t there always Thai?”
“I want to tell you something, Josh,” he said, stopping in the street.
“What?” Josh’s young face wore a blue veil of shadow from the awning, and a breeze brought in particles of fog that caught in his hair, on his lashes, a net of little beads spread over his worried face.
“I want to tell you,” he repeated, surprised by himself, and then Adam gave his son the story of his marriage. It made no mention of Carlos or Eli or the lie told before a heart-shaped cookie could be eaten. It made no mention of the rage on a cliff near a broken body. This was the version he wanted Josh to keep, the permanent version, the final draft to be published in his son’s mind. The story his son would tell Henry, maybe years from now, as they lay together in their own kind of marriage bed. This story began with the dinner party at the Spivaks, seeing his wife across the room in a zigzag dress. Her distracted heart, and how he won her. The struggles of her career, and his, their early poverty in Berkeley set against the splendor of the wedding her parents threw. And Josh’s birth, and the new house in Santa Cruz…. Josh looked interested but confused under the awning, sure these were details he already knew by heart, simply by being there himself, but Adam pressed on as their stomachs grumbled and the air dropped shawls of mist onto their shoulders. He told him details so he could imagine it, picture this life as real. He knew he was falling into the role of fathers, who will surprise you, oddly, by saying things like this so that their boys will love them.
But he also wanted Josh to know it would be good, his son’s own life. Like a lunatic, or a man in love, he went rifling through the drawers of his memory, picking out anything of value and handing it to his bewildered son—"She begged me to quit smoking, and would hit me with a wooden spoon if she smelled cigarettes on me!”; “I used to sit beside her at the telescopes, midnight, two in the morning, and hand her doughnuts"—piling old heirlooms in the poor boy’s arms because he wanted to give him the best. Not the truth, but the best. The best of his life, of his wife, of himself; the best lies, the important ones. So that he would finally see that fathers, meekly turning over steaks on grills, talking nonsense about money or grabbing their guts in front of mirrors, could be the walking cemeteries of old loves—just as Josh himself was. Just as this day was, with Josh stepping into a life with Henry Wong like a child stepping into a stranger’s car.
When he was done, Adam stood there panting, feeling excited and alive.
But his son simply looked at him, hands thrust firmly into his pockets, leaning against a wall and examining his father from the long distance of their years. “Dad, I know,” he said. A look of pain and amusement, a little love. “I know.” Around them, the fog, that flock of doves, fluttered in the failing twilight.
Eli had learned of his life’s mistake on the lip of a volcano. It was back in 1986 on a visit with his old colleague Jorges
on to the Mauna Kea observatories, as they stood on the crater struggling to breathe in the chill, thin air. It was just after the space shuttle had exploded, and scientific programs everywhere could feel the congressional finger on the switch, waiting for a word of funding, poised to close them down. So Eli and Jorgeson had come as experts to promote this project, and morning mists spread below them, filling with the sun’s faint ginger light and hiding the northern volcano, Mauna Loa. They had sipped their coffee on that morning, talking of the Keck domes to be built in the next decade; and of Swift, who was merely ill then; and of Kathy, of Denise. Then Eli, he didn’t know why, asked the ugly Swede about Carlos. It struck him, as the blond astronomer turned and blinked, that he had been here before. A different view, twenty years before, with Denise urging him to pry this same information from this same odd man. Eli had felt a nervous shiver as two distant pieces of his life touched, stuck briefly, and parted.
“Carlos?” Jorgeson repeated on that cold morning three years ago, wrinkling his soft face in concentration.
“Your friend Carlos. The handsome one.”
Then the man’s face settled; “Oh, you mean the military man. Did you know him? I haven’t heard from him since he was reassigned to Africa, I think. Back in the seventies. Is he okay?”
Eli shivered again. “Africa?”
“He’s been there for years. Never coming back. That’s right—he wrote me a letter in 1973 and I think I never replied. I always forget whose turn it is. People are so touchy.” Then Jorgeson, turning his back on the breathtaking view, pointed to the ground. “Ten-meter lenses! How will they do it? It dazzles me, Spivak, absolutely….”
The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Page 24