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Auditions for The Tempest had been the week before. I had spent the weekend memorizing Prospero’s epilogue and felt good after the tryout. On Tuesday, Damiano had announced the cast. To the surprise of several seniors, I got the lead. We spent the rest of the week doing read-throughs, with light blocking the following week. Monday evening, when I got home, I saw the table was set for four, and when I turned the corner into the kitchen, there was Mom, cooking dinner.
I lifted her in the air and shook her side to side, until finally she laughed and said, “Okay, Griffin, put me down and let’s eat. We’ve been waiting for you.”
Dad appeared and said, “Look who’s home.”
He took his seat, and then Mom walked to the table holding a wok and a serving spoon. “Your grandma had one of these when I was in Virginia, and I just loved it so much I had to get one.” She served my father and me and then herself. She said to me, “This is a perfect meal. It’s got a lot of protein, and if you go easy on the rice you can get your carbohydrates from the vegetables.” She sat. “I’m going to take over your diet this fall.”
If she’d told me she’d be feeding me only liver for the next year I’d have agreed so long as she stayed.
Dad, holding the bottle of wine, offered to top off her glass. She covered the goblet with her palm.
I served myself seconds. Dad, meanwhile, was holding a piece of chicken breast in his fingers and taking bites out of it.
“Shel,” Mom said, and he dropped it like a bad dog.
“It’s so good, ” he said with his mouth full and then found his napkin.
Later, she and I did the dishes together. It was quiet work, and I could not help but occasionally stare in wonder at her presence. Finally, she squinted at me and shook her head and chuckled. We were finished, but the faucet still ran. “What is it?” she asked.
I turned off the water. “Why’d you come back?”
She sighed. She toweled off her hands. Then, with the back of her damp fingers, she lightly stroked my face. “Your father is who he is. I am who I am. Until the end. Together. It’s that simple.”
I shrugged. “That sounds hard.”
“Lots of simple things are,” she said.
She glanced at Oren’s empty place setting that we’d left on the table and back at me. “Where’s your brother?” she asked.
First period, I had geometry.
Geometry I liked.
Geometry I got.
On the blackboard, not entirely erased, was the faint tracery of several maps from our first game of D its squat two-story homes insulated by begrimed siding and fortified by window bars.
After the service, Oren and I had stood in front of the chapel, amid the crowd.
We spied Dad, for maybe the first time in our lives, wearing a yarmulke.
I too had been struck by how moved Oren was at Elliott’s passing.
He stood before me in a double-breasted suit the color of eggplant, his hands jammed into his pockets.
He was crying freely.
His tie’s tongue hung from his coat’s pocket, and he’d undone one too many of his shirt’s top buttons, so that I was tempted to wrap my scarf around his neck to protect him from the wind.
For six months he’d been going to culinary school during the day and working as a pastry chef at an East Side bistro at night.
All those hours on his feet, all that time spent indoors, had drained the color from his face and ringed his eyes with dark circles, although these were also signs of struggles beyond fatigue.
What he needed was love and tending to, someone to tell him a story that ended with a rosy future beyond the holes out of which he was trying to dig himself.
Were there someone there for him, she might also get him to a doctor to have his thumb looked at.
The gauze bandage he wore, yellow at its tip, was so fat he couldn’t fit it in his pocket.
He’d burned himself torching crème br?lée a few nights ago, a serious injury that he showed me with something close to pride.
(“How about that?” he’d said, his expression mildly accusatory as he turned his wrist from side to side so that I could observe the digit from every angle.) The wound was as black as charcoal, the skin so flaked and fragile it appeared as if any pressure on the blistered edges might powder it to ash.
Oren was always like that when it came to pain: the heavier it was, the more he made light of it.
That was why his show of feeling now was so unusual.
Not that I was unaware of its source.
He’d stopped seeing Elliott the same year he started working.
His sorrow at Elliott’s death was shaded, I realized, by disappointment, by regret, I guessed now, at a missed opportunity that might have helped him then (and thereby allayed his suffering now), but which his cutthroat instincts had revealed wasn’t safe.
When I urged him to come with the family to the burial, he simply said, “I need to be alone.” Then he turned and hurried downtown, fleeing us because he didn’t trust us, which was, since he was a boy, what he’d wanted to be able to do most of all.
“Everybody deals with grief differently” was my answer to Naomi.
She shrugged at this pat truth and, keeping her eyes on the road, offered another. “Or doesn’t.”
Her utterance was tinged with melancholy, and for a second I wondered if she was referring to us. Brian, who was a psychologist, perked up at this mention of repression. He offered me his profile and, in a sage and slightly weary tone, said, “It’s often the case.”
Fuck you, I wanted to respond. This flippancythis smugnesswith which certain therapists alluded to a person’s blind side always drove me to distraction, because it revealed their assumption that they were no longer mysteries to themselves. Elliott, I reflected, wasn’t guilty of this hubris. “Never mistake your own perceptiveness for self-awareness,” he’d once told me, in those fervent couple of years I saw him again when I returned from school, “because one is an entirely different mode of knowledge than the other.”
“Got kids?” I asked Brian instead, knowing it would further frustrate Naomi to change the subject.
“Two of them,” he offered, and then turned to face the road.
Generally speaking, when parents hesitate to elaborate on their children, they’re doing it out of either mock humility or shame. The middle ground merely employed is the most reliable way to end such a conversation.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Right now, you mean?”
“In school, out of school? Kuwait?”
Naomi laughed at my remark, snorting. “Those two?” she said. “Military? Please.”
I have always judged the long-term health of any relationship by the speed with which one member will publicly throw the other under a bus. Brian glanced at her; his smile, which had, up until that point, light in it, hardened.
“My daughter,” he said, “the older one, is in medical school. In New Haven.”
“At Yale?” I asked, as if there were another institution of higher learning there.
“She is, yes.”
“And your son?”
“Oy,” said Naomi, and shot me a look.
Brian’s head twitched at her comment. “He’s at home,” he said, “riding out the Bush economy.” He offered me his profile again and smiled, as if his son’s rudderlessness were a brilliant strategy for dealing with the recession.
“Smart kid,” I said. Actually, my inflection rose just enough to make it a question.
“He is,” agreed Brian, nodding now, repeating, “He is,” perhaps to convince himself, a therapist who had, in spite of all his training, somehow maybe screwed up his child. “He’s had a tough transition out of college.”
“It’s often the case,” I said sagely.
But my heart wasn’t in this.
I thought back to that January night last year, sitting before the television in my first apartment, watching Baghdad get bombed in Desert Storm’s opening sorties, the white flares rendered phosphorescent by CNN’s night-vision lenses and then sinking like jellyfish into the green-tinted sky, the latter booming with antiaircraft fire.
There they are, I thought, those thousand points of light! Bush’s approval ratings were up, along with inflation and unemployment.
In one of my last sessions with Elliott before he got sick, I’d told him about a dream I’d had: I was bouncing through the desert in the back of a jeep, one of those old-school army models with its windshield folded atop the hood, the car driven by our commander in chief while the vice president rode shotgun.
Both had forgone helmets, their shirts open at the collars.
They seemed completely confident, as we ascended and descended the dunes, of our direction.
Was this, I’d asked Elliott, the collective unconscious bubbling up? “Jung me no Jungs,” he saiddream interpretation and its questionable symbology bored himbut he stayed on the subject of politics.
He was grim at the escalation of tensions in the Middle East, had predicted both a reinstitution of the draft and stiff resistance.
“This could be it,” Elliott said.
“This could be the Big One.” And while he sat, preoccupied, I took stock of the weight he’d lost, his sallow color, but because of my relative youth, his sublimation was still lost on me.
“I thought the eulogies were beautiful,” Naomi said. We’d merged onto the Grand Central Parkway, heading toward Jamaica Estates. “Especially Deborah’s. That story she told about him and Lynn falling in love.” She pressed her fingers to her chest and then looked at Brian over her glasses’ bridge. “I mean, if there was a dry eye in the place, I didn’t see it.” At the mention of this, she began to tear up herself. “I’m sorry,” she said to the both of us, wiping her eyes. I thought about the last time I’d seen her cry, on the stairway in her house. She had been talking about love then as well.
Brian placed his hand over hers and squeezed it. “They were beautiful,” he said. “You know what it made me wish?”
Naomi didn’t ask for his answer.
“That we’d been together all our lives,” he said. “That I’d known you when I was a boy.”
At this I stared at Naomi’s reflection, mercilessly, deliberately, while she kept her eyes on the white dashes the car swallowed on the road.
“So tell us your news,” Naomi said, after clearing her throat. Her choice of pronoun was loaded. “I heard a rumor you’ve decided to become a writer. You gonna talk about your child acting career? All the famous people you worked with?” She looked at me in the rearview mirror once more, and when she spoke next it was finally clear that this was what she’d wanted to talk about all along. “Gonna spill all your secrets?”
I had decided to become a writer, whatever that meant, although that wasn’t what I was dying to report to her.
“I’m getting married,” I said. If Brian hadn’t immediately turned to face me, he’d have noticed how utterly wounded Naomi was by this, her head shaking ever so slightly and her expression appearing squeezed, like fruit wrung of its final drops. I thought Brian was going to say “Mazel tov.”
Instead, he said, “An actor? Anything I’d have seen you in?”
On a late September afternoon, I rode my bike crosstown to meet Amanda.
It was a cold day, with low, oyster-colored clouds scudding east. The wind billowed the nets at the Central Park tennis courts. The joggers around the reservoir’s track shuffled silently. I heard only the nearer noise of my blood beating and the ticking of my spokes, which made me feel self-contained and strangely lonely. When I arrived at Nightingale, I sat across from the school, on the same town house’s stoop where we’d shot Take Two, and watched the dismissal, keeping an eye out for Amanda. When she spotted me, she waved and crossed the street. She wore a black sweater over a black Izod whose buttons she’d fastened all the way to the top.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I came to see you.”
“I babysit today.” She looked at her watch. “But it’s early. We could walk across the park.”
“All right.”
I did not walk with her. Maybe it was rude, but I stayed on my bike once we crossed Fifth, gliding very slowly alongside her, balancing upright on my pedals, occasionally, so as to not tip over, building a bit of speed and braking until she caught up, or circling her, when necessary, in wide parabolic loops to glide again beside her, to match her walking pace. At first, she delighted in this game, but soon she realized I had something to say, that I was waiting for the right time.
We entered the park at the Engineers’ Gate on Ninetieth. There was, I noticed for the first time, a memorial at the base of the stairs leading up to the reservoir’s cinder track, a man’s bust, and I made a mental note, the next time I passed it, to study its plaque. You could never exhaust the totality of this city any more than you could the knowledge of another person, or yourself.
“I can’t be friends with you anymore,” I said.
Amanda crossed her arms and slowed.
“It’s too painful for me,” I said.
She uncrossed her arms and wiped her eyes.
I glided alongside her and then circled her once more.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
I rode and did not look back.
I bumped the curb to get off the loop.
I crossed to the Great Lawn.
Its ball fields were eroding, their grasses browning.
Their dust blew into my eyes and stung.
I spied Belvedere Castle, high on its promontory.
Below it, the Delacorte came into view.
In front of the theater, the statue of Romeo and Juliet, the statue of Prospero and Miranda.
As you from crimes would pardoned be, I thought, Let your indulgence set me free.
The sky pressed down.
It muffled everything, even the wind drying my cheeks.
I exited the park, bearing south.
I rode past the Museum of Natural History, home to the blue whale.
To meteors and krakens.
To galaxies and dinosaurs.
Oh, but there is something fantastical about this island.
There must have been a spell cast upon it from before when this land was Arcadia, was Manahatta, and it is this: you can take two people, place them within shouting distance of each other, set them on their way, and in their lifetimes, they might never cross paths again.
Even if it became their most fervent wish, having been separated, they could no more find the other among its infinite paths or spy the other reflected in its countless windows than an invisible man could find an invisible woman in an invisible city.
I was nearing home, but my brother wasn’t there.
I stood on my pedals to go faster.
My spokes sang their propellered whirr.
I felt light, as if my bones had filled with air.
I passed the Dakota, ripping alongside its black iron rail, allowing myself to glide before I gently banked.
I saw the Wise Man and Two Dragons, the Wise Man and Two Dragons.
And then I turned toward the river and headed west.