Chapter 13 2008
On Sebastian’s screen is a photograph, low-quality, both old and taken hastily, printed in a cheap publication. His mother, beaming. A young Orson Grey, confused. Like he doesn’t want to be seen.
The caption reads: “Just Friends? We Don’t Buy It!”
The article is a jumble of words. No sign of husband / very cozy / enjoying / nothing serious / bold new / East Coast / chemistry.
Holy shit. This is it. The answer! The secret his father has been hiding!
She really had been free out there, reveling in her fame, playing and partying and sleeping with whoever she wanted!
Sleeping with celebrities! God, it must have felt like the whole world was fruit at her fingertips.
What a surprise that Al couldn’t handle the idea of her with anyone else, the fullness of her life.
It’s clear now: she had not needed him—and Sebastian doesn’t either.
The printer hums out warm pages, the image expanded to be unignorable. The craft box spills out onto the floor, sequins and pipe cleaners, construction paper and rainbow gel pens, materials of a glorious new reality. Life springs a new origin.
The car doors clunk closed, and they are on their way back, New Haven a disappearing gothic haze.
Stone walls and students and locals and the smell of pizza dough and high monastic windows that Al can almost (but not quite) project his daughter into.
How has time passed so quickly? Viola kicks off her shoes and throws her feet up on the dashboard and looks almost (but not quite) like her mother.
Turning homeward is a relief. Al can’t leave Sebastian for too long, not in that state.
It’s too easy, these days, for his son to get into trouble.
As they plunged south yesterday, even in the excitement of academic pilgrimage, Al had begun to feel the invisible limits of the car, which is to say the limits of himself, his ability to bear his daughter’s distance.
Pennsylvania is about as far as he’d suggest, New Jersey if (and only if) Princeton.
Obviously, he’d prefer she chose Harvard, but kids have to branch out, don’t they?
Anyway, any Ivy would be a coup, and it’s not unthinkable with her marks and her cello and her running.
But faultless as she is—he can’t help but carry with him a profound anxiety, which is the very plausible concern that she will reject him.
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, clenches and unclenches his hands as he turns back onto the freeway.
“What did you think?” he asks.
“It’s beautiful, obviously. And grand and magical.”
Her thoughtful smile, her wrinkled brow. “I’m sensing a ‘but.’ ”
“I don’t know, I can’t explain it. There’s a funny feeling there.”
“How so?”
“Like it’s pretending to be something other than what it is.”
“And what is it?”
“It’s pretending to be immortal.”
He laughs out loud. “You don’t think it is? One of the oldest universities in America?”
“Nothing American is immortal.”
“News to me. I was planning on living forever.”
He can feel her grin, the sun shifting over her ankles, his knuckles. The car fills with a superficial calm, a skin over the voice in his mind screaming: Tell her now!
He had thought he might say something last night at dinner, both of them enjoying fresh fish at a cozy harborside nook, the sea only a smell and a calm lapping sound somewhere below them.
But it had been impossible, looking at her.
Sure, he could justify it as the savoring of a happy moment, but in his heart, he knew—he knew—it was cowardice.
It would feel like telling Susan herself.
Instead, they reviewed their favorite crime drama, the latest death in a bucolic British shire.
They’d developed a habit of pausing halfway through episodes to hash it out.
It’s the taxi driver, she’d insist.
It can’t be, he would counter. It’s too obvious.
Yes, he’d become reliant on television in the evenings, sacrificing his attention to the bright screen, quieting down his own thoughts.
But mysteries hardly count as junk food, right?
They keep the mind active. And period dramas have historical value.
Maybe he is getting soft. But his daughter shares his love of sweet, cathartic resolutions, the pair of them as fitting as any detective duo; the opinionated stalwart and the precocious upstart.
It’s satisfying, premeditation, the idea that someone (even if a murderer) has planned out the when, where, and how of death.
“Heard from Sebastian?”
“No.”
“Has he… Have you talked at all…”
“No.”
It’s embarrassing, relying on her like this. But he can’t help but feel stability in this child, dependence on her judgment.
“It will be fine,” she says. “He’ll get over it.”
She did not ask him to explain about the tapes. Perhaps she can picture it. Perhaps she understands the weight of the wife he never knew.
“He hasn’t said anything about college stuff, has he?”
“Not really. He’s been working harder.”
“I noticed. It’s good he’s being realistic about the art.”
“I just don’t think school interests him. Not in an intrinsic way.”
“Not like it interests you.”
She looks out the window. Viola has never liked to be compared directly. She’s sensitive about fairness.
“Would you want to stay close to him?”
“Like go to the same college?”
“I’m not suggesting that.”
“No. I don’t know.” And between them sits the fat, silent fact that her brother also needs her. Without her, he might fall into an abyss.
“Viola, I need your help with something.”
He exhales deeply and begins.
Last month, at Dan Dunning’s anniversary party, he saw her again: Tillie Summers.
Well, Tillie Hancock, since the separation.
Her handshake came with a strange awakening, cauterized pathways sprouting new growths.
She spoke about everything she was learning to do now that her husband was gone.
For the first time, she figured out how to work the lawn mower.
She lit the barbecue. After a storm downed power on the whole street, she finally discovered where the fuse box was.
She started sleeping with a golf club under the bed.
My swing’s improved, she laughed, I’ve been practicing in my sleep.
As she spoke, he observed the ways that she took care of herself: her tidy, manicured hands, the floral moisturizer that she rubbed into them almost unconsciously as she spoke.
He had never understood the attraction before in carefulness, in precision.
Despite the unsubtle encouragement from Dan and his mother, Al has avoided dating. The thought of sitting across from a person and summarizing himself—a package of diplomas, offspring, and emotional baggage—is nauseating.
He wants someone who will understand intuitively how it felt to grow up in his world.
To wander through the woods with a group of boys, parents caring too much and not enough, collective abandonment and resourcefulness.
Someone who would understand these intangible moments forged him as much as anything else: losing his way, a small bridge collapsing behind him.
The water was cold and the current strong in the middle, and Al remembered the strange recognition of his own power to alter an environment, of the very fact of a journey making it impossible to repeat.
And so with women. He could not take Tillie Hancock to the quarry and ask her to cast off her shirt. He could not kiss her suddenly, or propose something reckless—these ideas would not titillate her. He is too old for these moves anyway.
“I asked her to drop by tonight.”
For a moment, the car is silent.
“Is that okay?”
“Dad!”
“Sorry—”
“No, it’s wonderful?”
“Really?”
“I’m so proud of you!”
She touches her hand to his shoulder and he thinks of all of the hours and years he has put into this person, all of the car rides to orchestra practices, all of the balanced and unbalanced meals, the phone call from the nurse when Viola got her period and he had to buy her tampons and wasn’t sure which ones were correct, and she was so mortified she didn’t speak to him for a week—all of that was worth it for this moment of permission, this grace.
“So what was the favor?”
“Can you talk to your brother?”
Viola bites her upper lip. “Mm.”
“Is that a yes?”
“You haven’t given me much time.”
“We’ll be home in an hour.”
But as they hit the city, traffic swells, hundreds of cars hitting the tunnels as Saturday night emits a gravitational pull.
Al complains with increasing agitation about the endless construction, the tactical error in taking this highway rather than the other.
By the time they arrive home, they are both exhausted and thirsty and desperate for a shower.
And a sleek black car squats in the driveway.
“It’s really nice to meet you,” Tillie says. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Hanging from the antique mirror opposite the front door is Sebastian’s masterpiece: the image from the forum enlarged over thirty sheets of paper, taped together, augmented with glitter, pipe cleaners, reflective stickers. In one of his mother’s lipsticks, he had written the words: Remember me?
The blond woman extends toward him a dainty, breakable arm.
“Sorry, you are—”
“Tillie. Didn’t your dad—”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
“I see.”
Sebastian is reeling, full of Madeira and the fact of this woman, her connection to his father.
“So, you make art?” she says, gesturing at the image.
“Sometimes.”
“I actually run a little gallery on Main Street, maybe you could come by.”
He’s seen those galleries, full of tragic, expressionless watercolors as bland as the people who buy them. They are places where art goes to die. Embarrassing. Embarrassing that she would consider him to be remotely interested.
Is this the type of woman his father wants?