by Larry Center
Tommy seemed to favor Monkey more, snuggling him close, and letting Radar lay at his side. Every so often he gave us his usual murmuring and humming sounds that resonated with the car’s engine.
“We’re off to see the chimps,” I said with a smile. “Who would have ever thunk it?”
“Indeed,” Cheryl said, nodding at me. “I know.”
Getting Cheryl to agree to visiting Weller hadn’t been hard at all.
I was standing at her front door when I showed her my video of Tommy and the chimps, the strange and crazy interactions. She was impressed. “Wow! Look at that! He does seem engaged, that’s for sure. If this helps Tommy, I’m up for anything. Zebras. Giraffes. Elephants. Whatever it takes.”
“Great. I’ll make the arrangements.” I gave her a wide smile while inside, I flushed with pleasure.
“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “we so often do things my way, all the therapies I mean, so let’s try it your way for once. It should be interesting.” Her conciliatory tone made me beam inside and out.
Now as we cruised down the interstate, Cheryl told me how she was taking her mother to receive treatment for her palsy, how her dad was in Brazil right now working on designing a new bridge, that a plumber had come to her house just yesterday because a pipe had burst in one of the bathrooms. I told her about my father and how sour he still seemed, and we made a joke about how he should work as the anti-greeter at Wal-Mart. “Get the hell outta here,” he’d probably say. “Just go home! All sales are canceled!” It felt so good to hear her laughter.
“How you doing back there, Tom-Tom?” Cheryl asked a minute later, looking at Tommy through the rearview mirror and giving him a bright smile.
“Good. Radar good. Monk good.”
“We had fun last night, didn’t we?” Cheryl said. The tone of her voice was cheery. “That pizza was great. And you did such a good job on the clown game.”
Tommy didn’t reply.
We lapsed into road silence as the music played from Cheryl’s radio: Sirius XM. Tom Petty. I let out a sigh that filled the car like smoke.
“So, how’s work coming, Cheryl?” I asked.
She glanced at me. “Good.”
I played with the vent on my side, opening it and closing it several times. Time crawled by. Cheryl looked over at me for a moment, and once again started tapping her fingers to the music.
“Come on, Cher,” I said finally. “There’s got to be something else we can talk about.”
She turned down the radio and gave me a forgiving smile. “Well, actually, I just got this crazy new job if you want to hear about it,” she said. “It’s really nuts.”
“Do tell.”
She took a breath, then dove in. “So, these new clients, two guys in their forties, wanted original Trompe L’oeil art pieces all over their house, in their bathrooms, foyer, kitchen, everywhere. You know, art that looks like the real thing, like a baseball sitting in a baseball glove, and you think it really is a baseball sitting in a baseball glove, but it’s really nothing but clay?”
“Yes. I know. Sure.”
“Well, I had to contact all these artists all over the country for samples and they finally settled on this one artist named John Ellison from Sedona. Then I had to make sure all the décor matched each piece of art in every room. They were so particular. I was calling places all over the world. The good thing was they didn’t care about the cost. They’re techno-wizards, gazillionaires, I think—a gay couple from San Francisco.”
“Cool,” I said, though the issues of gazillionaires and their designer bathroom needs seemed like life on a far-removed solar system.
“I was shocked. In a good way, of course.” She smiled. “It was a bonanza of a deal.”
“You’re the best at what you do, Cher. Everybody knows it.”
“Thanks, Chris. I appreciate your vote of confidence.” She looked sideways and our eyes met for just an instant, but it was long enough for me to see the old Cheryl, the woman who had fallen in love with me. I felt a little thud in my heart and the next thing I knew, I was dissolving back in time:
Our first trip together: Cheryl’s flowery fragrance wasn’t just intoxicating, it was hypnotic. We were flying from San Diego to Vegas for a last-minute weekend get-away before our wedding in the fall. I couldn't wait. This was our pre-honeymoon, so to speak, a little bit of jumping the emotional gun. Why not?
As we descended for the landing, the plane cruised over an explosion of neon lights below, reds, blues, yellows, flashing, too much to take in against the nighttime sky. In Vegas, enough is never enough. The Cabernet I was drinking seemed to have expanded my consciousness. I was high, figuratively, literally. Our hands were wrapped together, she had such soft hands, smooth, dexterous fingers, red nails, knowledgeable hands that knew how to touch me, how to reach me.
The MGM Grand, in all its bedazzlement, appeared below. “I love you,” I said. The words just bubbling up and out of me.
“I love you too.”
I couldn’t believe how happy I was, hearing those words from her. They were like magical incantations. It was as if I was inhaling the white line of happiness like a drug, snorting it up. I trembled with the expectation of what was surely to come, checking into the hotel—We’d gone all out and bought an expensive suite at the Wynn—walking into a gorgeous, finely appointed room, admiring the night’s electric neon view as we parted the curtains, the luxurious bed on which we’d come together. Vegas itself was our counterpart in this conspiracy, smiling at us, our witness to the wondrous secrets we shared behind closed doors.
“Do you think we’ll have children one day?” she’d asked plaintively, turning from looking out the window and its light-scape of a view to gazing into my eyes. The question came out of nowhere and I was taken aback.
“I don’t see why not. Sure,” I said. “I’d love to be a father. We’ve already talked about that, remember?”
“She’ll be a lovely child.” She gave me a winsome look.
“She?” I asked. My eyes wandered over her cheekbones, the fine line of her straight nose, the beautiful curve of her mouth.
“Or he,” she said. “It won’t matter, will it?”
“No. Of course not.” I laughed. “Just as long as it’s healthy.” We touched our plastic cups together and then toasted to the thought of what we knew was our rightful future: healthy children, perfect little tykes. I figured two of them, for sure, maybe even three, who knew? Then we shared a kiss that was everything I’d ever dreamed.
Time is a circle. I am, was, will always be, lost inside the circular motion of time.
Fast forward: Tommy was crying all night long. He’d thrown shit on the walls, running naked around the house, barely three years old, and he fell and cut his head on the sink in his bathroom. We needed to rush him to the emergency room, but Cheryl was yelling at me because she thought I was moving too slow, and I was yelling at her because, well, I was just yelling. She couldn’t find her car keys, my car was in the shop, and we nearly came to blows as our son wailed on and on . . .
“So, how’s the voice-over business these days?” Cheryl asked all of a sudden, breaking through my reverie, my circular, emotional chronology in which time loses all sense of forward-moving linearity. “Speaking of gazillionaires.”
“What?” I cocked my head toward her. I slammed into the present as if my emotional time machine had crashed back to earth. My ears felt plugged.
“Just kidding. Seriously, how’re things going with your VO career?” She gave me a glance, then looked straight ahead as she drove.
“Oh. Not bad.” I ran a hand through my hair while my stomach suddenly turned to jelly. “Could be better, though.” I was on the verge of having to find some other kind of drudgery to pay the bills, Uber driving being one such possibility. I was putting off this next step for as long as possible.
She waved a hand in the air. “I'm sure it’s fine.”
Buzzards swooped over a dead animal in the road
. The wide, endless sky above formed a stark counterpoint to how I felt—small and cramped inside the car.
“Birds,” Tommy said.
“Yes,” I said. “Big birds. So black too. They’re called buzzards.”
“Buzzzzz,” Tommy said. “Buzzzzz.”
“So, are you landing many jobs these days?” she asked.
She was pressing the issue. But I didn’t mind her snooping. “You know how it is. Busy, then slow, it’s up and down. I’m also considering going back to work for Focus.”
“Really.” She’d been driving with her right hand on the steering wheel, but now she put both hands on the wheel.
“Yep. I talked to Sam Axelrod.” Sam was a colleague at Focus Media, where I used to work as well. We’d spoken a few days ago. “Actually, Sam says he might be able to get me back on board. I’ve been thinking about finding something steadier. You know?” I started tapping my right foot.
“That would be perfect. Hey, listen . . . ” She paused for a moment and my ears pricked up. Someone once told me that it’s not the words we say that really count, but the silences between the words. That’s what we should really listen to. When it came to Cheryl, I had learned to listen to those silences very closely.
“Yes?” I said.
Another long pause, then: “See, there’s this new issue I wanted to talk to you about. And I think now’s a good time to bring it up.” The tone of her voice changed, thicker, more serious.
“Which is?” I asked.
Cheryl glanced at Tommy in her rearview. I turned and inspected him too. He had dropped Radar and Monkey and now looked lost in his own world, his eyes, dark and distant as he put his red and scraped knuckles in his mouth.
“So, there’s this place called the Acorn School I’ve come across,” she said. She turned down the radio.
“Okay,” I said. “And?”
“It’s strictly for children on the spectrum, and they have all this impressive data. It’s in Houston. It’s expensive, but,” the words came out in a rush, “I really feel it might be worth it.”
“For Tommy? Houston?” I didn’t quite get it.
“In fact, I’m thinking about flying out and taking a look. I checked out their website. They seem to really have their act together. Behavioral therapy, biofeedback training, and something called ‘static exercise.’ The reviews all say it’s extremely effective.” She swallowed, turned to me, and gave me a determined Cheryl look, one I knew too well. When it came to finding help for Tommy, she was one-hundred percent all in. As devoted a mother as there ever was. She spoke seriously. “Look, Chris. If this school’s as good as they say it is, I want us to consider sending Tommy there.”
I said nothing for a moment, just taking it all in. I let my mind absorb the words, then felt them drop into my heart. “You mean we’d all just pick up and move? To Houston? What about your interior design business?”
She was part owner of the business, but brought in probably eighty percent of the sales.
“Oh,” she flicked a hand, “I’d sell my half and start over. It wouldn’t be a big issue.” She took a breath, then put a hand in the air, palm forward, as if she were giving a pledge. “If it would help Tommy, I’d do it. Absolutely.”
“I mean . . . Of course,” I said slowly. This was news. I really didn’t know what to think. Did people move halfway across the country with their ex-spouses? Or was she trying to get rid of me? My stomach suddenly knotted up. “It sounds kind of drastic.” I forced calm into my voice while my hands turned wet. “You think it would really be better than Hillwood?”
“Hillwood, right.” Cheryl spoke derisively. “You mean the school where they wouldn’t even tell us he was having a problem with his classmate? That school where he got in a fight? Where he’s hardly making any progress?”
Slow progress was the reality. This was true enough. And yes, an incident had occurred between Tommy and another boy with Asperger’s. On the playground, William, a smallish kid who had an obsession with turtles was trying to talk to Tommy and play with him, but Tommy’d wanted to be left alone. Tommy pushed William down and a fight broke out between them. Tommy started it. I’d witnessed it while helping the teacher for the afternoon. It was miserable. I’d rushed to them along with the teacher and pulled the boys apart. William had landed a blow to Tommy’s head. Tommy had been suspended for the day.
Once Cheryl had learned about the fight, she’d gotten all over the principal and the teacher through vitriolic emails, asking why she hadn’t been informed regarding “our son’s and that boy’s relationship.” Of course, she’d added a carefully worded apology as well. The principal had written back promising to do a better job keeping William and Tommy apart.
But could this Acorn School in Texas possibly offer something that much better?
We passed a VW bus, one of those sixties looking things. Sure enough, a long-haired, hippie-looking guy was driving. Probably listening to something like the Grateful Dead. Or Jimi Hendrix. I had to smile. Who said time always moved forward in a linear fashion?
“I’m definitely flying out there,” Cheryl said. “Do you want to come with me?”
“Is it a boarding school of some sort?” I still didn’t know if she was totally serious about this, or just pondering it, or what? I stared at her profile, her straight nose, high cheekbones, colored with a touch of makeup. It was all a mask. I had no idea what she was thinking.
“No. The children just attend during the day, and then go home. But while they’re there, it’s totally rigorous.” She kept her eyes on the road.
“Look. If this school’s worth it, anything for Tom-Tom,” I said, ponying up. “I’d never stand in the way of him getting a better education. Never.”
“Good.” She turned my way and gave me a quick encouraging smile. “So, you’ll check it out?”
“Sure. Tommy’s what it’s all about it. Whatever it takes.”
“Takes,” Tommy repeated from the backseat. “Tom-Tom. Ouuuu . . . uuuuuu . . . There?” he said. “There?”
“No, not yet,” Cheryl said, her voice sweet. “How about reading your book?”
Tommy grabbed the “See-And-Say” book lying next to him and started to look through it.
“Mom. Go. Home. See. Dad. Play. Swing.” He spoke the words, one at a time, slowly, carefully, his brow furrowed as he worked hard to decipher the letters.
“Good, Tommy,” Cheryl said. “That’s wonderful reading! Isn’t that right, Chris?”
“The best!” I said, feeling a rush of joy inside.
“Yay, Mommy!” Tommy smiled and clapped his hands.
“You’re such a good boy,” Cheryl said. “A good, good boy. And you did such a fantastic job with the puzzles last night, especially the ABC one. And you were so nice at dinner, eating with a fork and everything. You should’ve seen him, Chris. He was really doing a great job!”
“Good boy,” Tommy echoed. He clucked his tongue. “Good boy.”
“He’s such a cute thing,” Cheryl said, tossing some hair off her shoulders and adjusting the AC.
“Are you kidding? He’s amazing,” I said, and then did my impression of Simon Cowell on America’s Got Talent, launching into a snobby British accent. “This kid floors me. He’s got the voice, the moves, the talent, he’s going to go far. Comes from Liverpool, does he?”
Cheryl laughed. “Damn, Chris. That’s good.”
Tommy tried reading a few more words, then forgot about the book and withdrew into himself, sucking on his hands. We’d found it was better to let him go with the flow than to force him back into doing something he wasn’t interested in.
Silence once again prevailed. It had a dimension to it, for sure, and it spoke too. Knowing Cheryl as well as I did, our silences were never empty, meaningless phrases. This one said all kinds of regretful things, talked far too clearly: how our marital relationship had spun off the tracks, the pain and the anger that had ensued. It was as if she was trying to tell me: please, do not bri
ng up our heartbreaking past.
I couldn’t read her mind, but I certainly could fathom her heart at times. No doubt about it.
Still, hanging out with your ex on a road trip is not something I would recommend to Yelp readers with anything more than a one-star review.
I played with the vent on the passenger side again. This breaking news about Houston . . . This was a major-league decision. I clasped my hands together. If she planned on moving out of state with Tommy. Wait a minute. She couldn’t do that, could she?
What if I said no?
My phone rang. I peered at the number on the caller ID, and blinked: Damn if it wasn’t Sam. This could be about Focus.
“Hey guy, guess what?” Sam said loudly in my ear, his voice full of energy and high-voltage excitement when I quickly answered.
“You’re changing sexes?” I said.
“Nope.”
“Well, I’m surprised. I thought sure you’d said—”
“Shut up and listen, will ya? This is important. Now look. The fact is I just landed you a frickin’ Monday morning interview with Ed Ryerson himself. Are you up for it?” His excited voice, pulsating with energy, dug straight into me. I sat up in my seat.
“Really?” I said. “You mean he’s giving me a shot?”
“Hell yeah!” Sam’s voice grew louder, making sure I understood. “Be there at ten a.m. Sharp.”
“Man. Thanks, Sam. I can’t tell you how much—”
“Oh, hush.” He laughed. “Just be there with bells on. And agree with everything he says. The word is he’s very interested.”
“Cool,” Cheryl said when I ended the call and told her what was what. “That’s great news.”
“I know.” I grinned, feeling a sense of satisfaction balloon inside me. This was good news.
Cheryl checked on Tommy in the rearview mirror. I turned around and saw that he’d fallen asleep. Sleep was rescue; sleep was perfection. “You’ll take it, right?” she asked.
“We’ll see,” I said, assuming a nonchalant air, trying to conceal my desperation. “I need to go through the interview first. I have to see if it’s a good fit, too.”