The Altruists

  She was nervous about their reunion, and attributed his flat affect to the weather, surely different from the climate he’d become accustomed to in Zimbabwe. Or maybe his frigidity was karmic retribution for her dating Messner. In fairness, she’d been trying to leave him all autumn. But every time she told him that they needed to sit down and talk, some opportunity would present itself to Messner—tickets to a show in New York, a reservation at a fashionable restaurant—and Francine would have to postpone the conversation and continue, for the time being, to endure him. To accommodate his courtesies and kinks.

  She told herself that she would drop him first thing tomorrow.

  As they drove through wintry Boston, Francine tried to stoke conversation. “Your last call was a little patchy,” she said. “What exactly happened over there? I didn’t expect you back this soon. I’m excited to see you! But I didn’t expect you.”

  Arthur stared through the passenger-side window.

  “By the way, I have this subletter,” she said as they arrived, leading him up the stairs to the apartment. “She’s been in the second bedroom. She’ll be out by the end of the week, but needs a few more days to find a new place and move.”

  “Okay.”

  Something was wrong. Arthur hated strangers. Why wasn’t he arguing with her? What had happened to him?

  Francine opened the door and stepped into a space that felt, immediately, hostile. Marla met her eyes from the couch and gasped, loudly. Messner was pacing through the living room.

  “What are you doing here?” Francine asked.

  “You told me you were leaving town for the weekend,” Messner said.

  “I needed time—”

  “And who is that.”

  Arthur stepped forward and out of the fog that had enveloped him since landing in Boston. “Who am I? Who are you?”

  “Ooh,” said Marla. “Mexican standoff.”

  “I’m her friend,” said Messner, pointing at Marla, “and her boyfriend.” His finger fell on Francine.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  Arthur gave Francine a long, understanding look before turning back to Messner.

  “No, I don’t,” he said, in the voice of the man she’d fallen in love with. “Because I’m her fiancé.”

  Messner threw up his hands. “Fiancé?!”

  Francine was stunned. “It’s—um—”

  “I think you should be going now,” said Arthur.

  “This is bullshit!” cursed Messner. “Bullshit! You didn’t tell me you were engaged!”

  “Well—”

  “She is.”

  “Hold on, hold on, hold on,” said Messner. “Where was he this whole time?”

  “He was away,” said Francine meekly. “Africa. Zimbabwe.”

  “And what the fuck was he doing there?”

  She met his bloodshot stare. “Helping people.”

  “I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe this.” He turned to Marla. “Did you know?”

  “Um . . .”

  “You did! Holy shit, you did! I’m the last to know. I guess that makes me an idiot, right? A real goddamn idiot!”

  “You’re not an idiot,” said Francine. “If I can explain . . .”

  “There’s nothing to explain. You’re a liar. A fucking liar and a terrible person. Understand? Terrible!”

  “Wow,” said Marla. “Most people live and die and never get to see stuff like this.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Francine.

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t.”

  “Believe it,” Arthur growled.

  “I want to hear it from her.” Messner flared his nostrils. “Are you going to marry this asshole?”

  Marla drummed on her thighs.

  Arthur looked longingly at Francine.

  She inhaled. Exhaled. Steadied herself. And with convincing gravity, she said, “I am.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Not once in the course of their initially fictive—and subsequently real—engagement, nor marriage, did Arthur ask her about Messner. Who he was, and what had transpired between him and Francine. He simply did not want to know. This, to Francine, was the most charitable thing he had ever done. To not ask questions. To let it go. He had given her the greatest gift a partner can give, and the most difficult: a conditionless second chance, no questions asked.

  That first night in bed, after Messner had stormed out forever, Arthur wept and told her everything. The Moyos, Rafter, Jamroll, all of it. The sleeping sickness. The tsetse flies. When he finished, Francine, who by now was also weeping—for her partner’s failure, yes, but predominantly for the town that bore the brunt of his ambition and would pay for it for years to come, and the comparative meagerness of her suffering in his absence—wiped her eyes and calmly led him to the bathroom. She bathed him in the coffin-wide tub, kneeling over the porcelain rim, scrubbing him with a hand cloth as his tears salted the bathwater. She told him it would be all right. That he had done his best. And, grateful for his silence on the Messner question, assured him that the flies were surprise variables. That there was no way to predict their arrival. That man could not control the course of nature. It’s not your fault, Arthur, she told him, even if she didn’t entirely believe it herself. It’s not your fault.

  After his bath, Francine said that she had a surprise for him. She dried Arthur off and laid him on the bed. She wrapped a necktie around his eyes and knotted it tight at the back.

  When the first drop of hot wax landed on his fleecy chest, he yipped.

  TWELVE

  They drove in masculine silence: tense, dumb, lonely. Out the driver’s-side window, three abutting cemeteries shared unincorporated, golf-green land, hidden from the road behind overgrowth, utility poles, pointless signage (↔), downed circuits. Missouri gets rural so fast, you don’t even have to leave the suburbs, Ethan thought, staring straight ahead in observance of the first rule of male silence: look away.

  Arthur caved first.

  “Good show.”

  Ethan nodded. “Mmm.”

  “It was . . . elegant.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Silence is a breeding ground for sadness, where memory never fails to turn up, but all Ethan could think about was the spectacle he’d just witnessed. The last few hours. The parties, the sorcerer, the birds, the death plummet. Through his window, a row of double-mortgaged ranches flowed down a hill.

  “So . . . ?” said Arthur. “What did you think?”

  “What did I think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of the University of Missouri–St. Louis production of Swan Lake?”

  “Yes.”

  Ethan shook his head in disbelief. “I . . . I don’t think anything. I don’t know. What was that?”

  “I agree it was a little over-the-top.”

  “No, I mean . . . Dad. Why did we do that?”

  Arthur cleared his throat. “I thought it might be fun.”

  “The ballet?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Is that a thing you do now? A hobby you picked up?”

  “No.”

  “Then why did we spend two and a half hours in that auditorium?”

  “For you.”

  “For me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m taking an interest. In you. This is me taking an interest.”

  “In me?” he asked. “But what does the ballet have to do with—” And suddenly it dawned on him.

  And Ethan laughed.

  It had no point of origin, the laugh. No catapult. But it shot bottom up through his body, rattling every organ, strumming every vein.

  Arthur stiffened. “What? What’s funny?”
>
  Ethan tried to answer but the laugh was a closed loop. All feedback. Nurturing itself, choking out speech.

  “What is it?”

  He tried to answer but he couldn’t, consumed now in a spasmodic full-body laugh, a laugh that does not touch language, a laugh untethered from its origin, acousmatic, solipsistic, immoderate, uncivilized.

  “What’s funny!” Arthur barked.

  What’s funny? What’s funny? What’s funny was this: though Arthur shared building space with the gender studies department, and by now had surely wrapped his head around the differences between sex and gender, beauty standards as social constructs, and the normative phantasms that coerce people into mutually disagreeable intercourse, for all his understanding of queer theory, Ethan realized in a fit of sublime laughter, his father did not understand queer people. His father did not understand him. All at once Arthur’s reasoning revealed itself:

  Gay → Ballet

  and struck him as ill judged, reductive, and so uncharacteristically simple that he could only laugh.

  Ethan had never expressed even the slightest interest in dance. Not ever. Swan Lake. At UMSL! It was too absurd to be believed. Tears flowed freely from his eyes. That his father would attempt to bond with him at the ballet was not merely a gross misjudgment of Ethan’s character. It pointed to a larger fallibility, a gap in Arthur’s armor, a design defect, and this, too—the years spent cowering beneath someone this obviously flawed, so beyond wrong about his son in particular and people as a species—caused Ethan to shake with laughter.

  “Ethan!”

  But he was beyond conversation. He was somewhere else. Arthur’s knuckles whitened on the wheel.

  * * *

  • • •

  Boston, 1994. Late summer. The sun warming the undersides of clouds, a honeyed glow over everything. Yawkey Way garnished with awnings. The wind sweeping wrappers and peanut shells, slipping the confusion of bodies, carrying the scalpers’ murmur (Tickets, tickets) and the slurs of unrepentant Massholes. Hot dogs turning over in water. A flood of red jackets and caps to match the banners flying along the park’s brick facade above arched and gaping green gates. Fenway Park.

  He knew that a tenth birthday was special but he hadn’t imagined it like this. A big day, the tickets ordered in advance, the unexpected physical contact between father and son. The touch: Arthur holding Ethan’s hand in his, dark and covered in wild hairs, as he led him into the stadium.

  “We’re in the nosebleeds,” Arthur said.

  The outing had been his father’s idea. Arthur had always followed baseball, but in the weeks leading up to game day his passing interest boiled over into something resembling religious fervor. At dinner, he stopped complaining about his work on the Big Dig—the endless negotiations with the city, corrupt contractors, abuses of the budget—holding forth instead about the ways the Red Sox became more lovable with each losing season, the appeal of a team cursed to fail. “With the Sox, it’s not the other team you’re up against,” he lectured. “It’s your own disappointment. You watch season after season, knowing they’re not going to make it—but you watch. And when you lose, what you feel is not the pain of being bested. It’s the pain of knowing better. The pain of having tricked yourself once again into dumb, blind faith. Ethan, you’ll see this firsthand at the game. It’s not us versus them. It’s the individual fan at war with himself. A city at war with itself. If we had any sense we’d make Bill Buckner our mascot. Our state bird! Boston is a pair of legs and the ball of victory keeps rolling through. And isn’t that enough to make the game worth watching? Isn’t the self more compelling than a conventional adversary, the whole us-versus-them barbarity you see in other sports?”

  Francine translated. “He’s excited to take you out,” she said. “Ten years old. It’s a big one. Double digits.”

  Arthur was prone to periodic bouts of enthusiasm, manic highs followed by long stretches of gloom. But this was different. For once, he was looking to share his excitement. And he had zeroed in on Ethan, steering him into the vortex of his ardor. Maybe, Ethan thought, his father wasn’t indifferent to parenthood after all. Maybe he was waiting on this birthday, double digits, to begin.

  “I’m going to let you in on a secret,” Arthur said when the day arrived at last.

  A secret! Ethan beamed.

  “The markup on food and beverages at the park is criminal. A beer will run you four bucks more at Fenway than it will at a bar across the street.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the park sets their own prices. It’s like a sovereign state.”

  “Mom said I should get a Fenway Frank.”

  Arthur shook his head. “I’m sure she did. But that’s playing into the stadium’s hands. And fortunately for you, your father isn’t one to be jerked around.”

  He packed two brown paper bags with bagels, apple slices, Cape Cod potato chips, and, for Ethan, a juice box. Ethan marveled at his father’s ingenuity.

  “Grab your winter coat,” Arthur said.

  “Why? It’s hot out.”

  “Do it.”

  Ethan fetched his coat from the hall closet and returned to the kitchen.

  “Put it on.”

  The down jacket puffed him out, enfolding him in his body heat. Arthur zipped him up halfway and stuck the packed paper bags inside the coat. “They never suspect the kid.” Arthur grinned.

  They found their seats in the right-field bleachers. They were far from the action—miles, it seemed, from home plate—but Ethan preferred it that way, tucked into a distant corner of the park where there was less competition for Arthur’s attention. They had a better view of the checkered outfield than they did the diamond. A sliver of the Citgo sign rose from behind the blank emerald face of the Green Monster.

  “Get our dinner out,” Arthur said. Ethan shed his jacket and passed his father one of the bags, a jolt of complicity lighting him up inside. They’d broken a rule, sneaked food into the park, and Ethan made a private vow to take it to his grave.

  Arthur took a bite out of his bagel. “What we should do is put you in Little League,” he said, chewing. “Put you in a jersey. Put you in the batter’s box. All eyes on you. The pressure. The thrill. That’s what we should do. You watch the game today, you see if you like it. I can train you. I can help you. You’ll see.”

  Nothing sounded less appealing to Ethan than that degree of pressure—or thrill, for that matter—but if it kept his father like this, excitable, interested, he would readily sign up. He speared his juice box with the straw and took a drag on it.

  The innings stacked up, one after the other. “What you’re seeing in baseball is what you’re seeing in the country at large,” Arthur said. “The decline of the American male. I’m not passing judgment one way or another—I’m saying, it’s the historical moment we happen to occupy. We think of the sport as a national pastime but that’s changing. The makeup of the teams is changing. Not that immigration is anything new. Your great-grandparents were immigrants, of course. But we live in the world of NAFTA now and you don’t need to look any farther than Fenway to see it. The Dominican Republic in particular is churning out some interesting prospects. It’s big business down there. Kids dropping out of school at twelve, thirteen, fourteen—a little bit older than you—hoping to make it big in the States. The MLB has a rookie academy down there. We’re not seeing much from Japan, interestingly, though they’ve had baseball since the 1800s. I won’t speculate on why that is but for all its civility there’s still a strong bodily component to the game and my theory is that in many cases the Japanese aren’t physically large enough to compete at this level.”

  He paid little attention to the content of his father’s disquisitions but enjoyed the fact of their happening. It excited him to see his father excited, and to think he had some role in it, the birthday an occasion to shell out for tickets.


  But he also noticed, with the clear eyes of a child who spends most of his time alone, that none of the other men in their section, not even the fathers with young sons, were holding forth like Arthur was. They didn’t talk—they yelled. They hurled heckles and cheers in the direction of the diamond, or else they shouted down the aisle for beer. Arthur did this, too, but awkwardly and without conviction. For his part, Ethan stayed quiet, clapping when his father did. It was more dignified, somehow, to make noise with your hands. He was working his way up to a vocal cheer.

  In the bottom of the fifth, a ball went flying over the outfield, hanging in the air above his father’s head. “Dad—Dad!” Ethan sputtered, tugging on Arthur’s arm with his right hand and pointing at the sky with his left. The ball hung in the air at its peak and then fell with a thwack into the ready glove of the right fielder. Arthur laughed. “Don’t mistake a pop-up for a home run,” he said. “That’s a life lesson you can use.”

  Arthur stood during the seventh-inning stretch. “Get up,” he told Ethan. “This is where we get our blood flowing again.” A couple slid past them down the aisle, part of a larger migration of spectators toward the restrooms in the bowels of the park. A man behind them said, “Hold my beer a minute.”

  The names of corporate sponsors were booming over the stadium speakers when Ethan felt a wetness on the back of his head, something tamping down his hair and trickling, cold, down the back of his neck. He brought his fingers to the wet spot, the whorl from which his hair grew clockwise.

  “Dad?” he said.

  Arthur looked down. “Jesus,” he said, “what did you . . .”

  Ethan followed his father’s eyes to the man standing behind him: tall, blue-eyed, broad shouldered, in a tight T-shirt that hugged his arms as he stretched them. He stood beside a freckled boy about Ethan’s age. The boy had a plastic cup of beer in his hands, filled nearly to the brim.

  Arthur bent to meet the freckled boy at eye level. “Did you do this?” he asked, pointing to Ethan.

  The boy shook his head.

  “Did you spill beer on him?” Arthur said again. “It’s okay if you did. But you have to come clean and apologize.”