CHAPTER NINETEEN #4
“Oh, but I’ve handled it poorly. The idea was either for you to know early on or never find out, you know?” She stared into middle distance and shook her head, as if thinking about something she still found hard to believe. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“It’s fine. I’m glad I know.”
“When he was alive, Doug and I discussed the possibility of telling you once you got to a certain age,” Nora said. “We did consider it. But then he died. And we thought, what would the point be? Just to devastate you?”
Carver was beginning to feel nauseous. He stood and paced the room, still clutching the print-out in his hand, needing some locomotion. “But he had family. I could have known his family.”
“They weren’t him. Nothing could bring him back.”
“Knowing him — knowing about him. It would have been — been better. Okay?”
“Carver, you’re going to make yourself hyperventilate.”
Carver hadn’t realized his breathing had sped up. He slowed it down. “I should have known. I wanted to know.”
“I see that now. We see that now.”
“Tell me about him,” he said, turning to her. “Tell me more about him, I want to know.”
Nora stared up at him from behind the desk. “What do you want to know?”
“What did he like to do? Who was he, besides a doctor? Did he, like, watch ALF? Just tell me stuff.”
Nora squinted at him, then chuckled. “No, honey, he didn’t watch ALF. I think he died before ALF even started airing.”
“Well, tell me something else then!”
“Okay. Can you sit back down?”
Carver obeyed, but leaned forward this time, his elbows on the desk. She studied him, then exhaled.
“As far as TV shows,” she said, “he liked Cheers, and Remington Steele. I think he had a crush on Stephanie Zimbalist. He liked going to the movies, he loved watching movies on VHS. Um…” Nora looked away, lowering her gaze as if racking her memory.
“He was a runner, obviously… he ran the New York marathon three times. He was very good at trivia. Isaac, Doug and I were a great trivia team.”
Carver nodded encouragingly, desperate for more.
“He was sort of anal about interior design,” Nora said.
“He liked things just so. I remember Rachel complaining she wasn’t allowed to put up her posters because they clashed with his design sensibilities.
” She said this with fondness, as if she liked this about him.
“He read a lot of magazines and medical journals, he was always reading, but not usually books. What else… he was very social, he liked bringing people together. He had a silly sense of humor, he liked to tease and pull little practical jokes. The night I met him, he convinced me his hair was a wig.”
She went quiet. Carver waited, transfixed, thrumming with energy.
“Um,” Nora said, her voice cracking. “He was always terrified of his cancer coming back. He got it young, in college. When it recurred — well, it didn’t really recur.
He would correct me about that if he were here.
He got a second cancer, secondary acute myeloid leukemia.
It’s something you can get if you’ve had radiation or chemo.
And by the time they found it, it was already very bad.
” Her voice broke, and she cleared her throat.
“When he called to tell me it was back, and much worse this time, I remember he kept saying, ‘I knew it. I knew it.’ But he didn’t give up his hope of beating it until the very, very end. ”
Carver wanted to reach out to her, to touch her hand or something, but he was sure she wouldn’t want this. All he could do was stare at her in silence. Her eyes had filled with tears.
“It was so devastating for him to realize he’d never be a surgeon,” she said. “It was horrible.”
“What about me?” he couldn’t help asking. “What about not being able to see me grow up?”
“Oh…” Nora dabbed her eyes with her pinkies.
“We talked about that sort of obliquely. Just, you know, the lost opportunity there. That even if you found out somehow and wanted to know him, you’d never be able to.
But he told me he wasn’t worried about you, that he thought you’d live a great life.
You know, he thought quite highly of you, even though you were so young.
He could tell you were bright, which was very important to him. ”
“Yeah,” Carver said with difficulty.
“I do worry I let him down, with how things ended up going with us, and you.”
“Mom, I…” He let out a dry laugh and clasped his hands together. “Look, he was one of the architects of this fucked-up situation, so…”
Nora’s eyes filled with tears again. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For all of this blubbering.”
“Mom, come on.”
She opened a desk drawer and dug around until she unearthed a small pack of Kleenex, then got a tissue out to dab her eyes and blow her nose.
Carver realized he had folded and crumpled the piece of paper in his hand at some point, and he tried to fix it, laying it flat against his thigh and smoothing it out. Josh Levin and Lena Levin-Kim. Josh Levin and Lena Levin-Kim. Josh Levin and Lena Levin-Kim.
“You really think he would have liked me?” he said. “As an adult?”
“I do think so, yes,” Nora said. “I think he would see you as a very worthy heir.”
Carver’s own eyes filled with tears, then, and his throat got tight. “Okay. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t believe it.”
He let out a rueful laugh. “I know.”
Nora reached up to smooth her hair again. It was clipped back by a barrette, but some flyaways were escaping. “Are you going home tomorrow?”
“Uh… I’m not sure.”
“I’m assuming you’re not going home home,” she said with a raised eyebrow.
“No, I, uh… Lillian said it was okay with her if I stayed at our place, but that didn’t feel right.”
“Understandably,” Nora said. “But don’t you two own other properties?”
Carver shrugged. “The places we own in the city or around it have tenants in them, the rest are vacation homes.”
“So where do you plan to go?”
“I might stay on our yacht.”
Nora shook her head. “You’re going to live on a boat?”
“I don’t know why everyone’s so against this idea,” Carver said. “Tom Hanks did it in You’ve Got Mail.”
“What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”
“I don’t know, he made it look kind of fun.”
“It won’t be fun,” Nora said. “You’ll get tired of it in a week, I know you will.”
He shrugged. “Then I’ll go to a hotel, I guess.”
“Carver…”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Nora said. “Just don’t retreat into any sad cliches, please.”
“Where do you want me to stay, here?”
“You’d be welcome to.”
“Seriously? After all this? You don’t think we should have some space from each other?”
Nora’s lip twitched like she wanted to say something but had stopped herself.
“What?” Carver said.
“We really did it all wrong,” she sighed. “We should have just accepted… you know.”
“Accepted what?”
“Your…” Nora waved her hand in the air almost dismissively. “Your predilection toward boys.”
“Oh,” Carver said, his heart speeding up.
“I really did think you could be steered toward women,” she muttered, “but I wonder if that was just wishful thinking, or me projecting Isaac onto you. Isaac loved women.”
“Clearly.”
“Don’t be a smartass,” she said, but there wasn’t much energy in it.
“No, I noticed that you liked boys. And boys liked you, quite honestly. I think they sensed a feminine side to you, and some of them were more aggressive with you because of it, but some of them were actually more gentle. And you clearly liked that. I remember watching this happen and just being, you know…” She gestured, comically widening her eyes. “‘Oh my God.’ I was terrified for you.”
Carver was astonished to hear her report on this with such vivid detail. “And Dad apparently didn’t notice anything like that,” he said.
“No, he wouldn’t have,” Nora said. “Or if he did, he wouldn’t let himself recognize it. He was trying to ignore anything that… you know. But I saw it. A mother sees everything.”
“Yeah.”
“And now, of course… in one weekend, it’s just all come down,” she said, and laughed. “Just like that, you’re leaving your wife to pursue — what, Scott? It’s incredible.”
Carver, emboldened by this strange mood she was in, ventured: “Isn’t any part of you relieved?”
Nora exhaled, spinning a little in the chair again. “I don’t know.”
“I’m happier not pretending. Aren’t you happier not flinching?”
“Well, it’s as if you chose that strange übermensch woman just to prove a point,” she said with a scowl. “‘See, see, now I won’t be happy even though she’s perfect on paper, so I must be gay.’ When, of course, the way the person makes you feel has just as much to do with it.”
“Sure, but I am actually gay.”
“I’m not even denying that,” Nora said. “I’m just saying life is complicated.
And I thought you might not be happy living as a gay man, either, so if there was any part of you that cared for women, then maybe you could find a nice one who loved you very well, and it would be enough, and better than an honest but tragic life. There’s no nobility in tragedy.”
“Being gay isn’t as tragic now, Mom.”
“Yes, and that happened very suddenly. You know it did.”
“I do hear what you’re saying,” Carver said, feeling charitable. “You wanted to protect me, I get it. It backfired. Let’s leave it at that.”
“So everything backfired,” Nora said, throwing her hands listlessly in the air. “Every single thing we did for you.”
“Why don’t we just, uh, move forward,” Carver said, rising to his feet and tucking the print-out she’d given him into his pocket.
“Let’s quit looking back. The shit that happened, happened.
But I’m gonna live my life now, and if you really are as afraid of losing me as you say you are, then maybe you and Dad can swallow any disapproval about my personal life going forward. ”
“Any?” she said. “Even if you come home scantily clad with piercings in your face, on the arm of your biker boyfriend?”
Scantily clad? “Biker boyfriend?”
“Scott.”