Chapter 5 The Motives of a Dead Boy’s Dad An Essay Question #3
Again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him. But I felt both (both!) a moral responsibility to discuss what Nick Foster had seen and might do and an irresistible craving to see this man who always made me feel good.
Really, really good.
It was a steak house between Lexington and Third on East Forty-Fifth with a couple of small private dining rooms, some so intimate they were but a credenza and a table.
They had the dark paneling of university clubs and Old World libraries.
We had one of those enclaves, and I suspected even at eighteen that it was a hothouse for illicit pre- or postcoital trysts.
Our server supposed we were father and daughter.
Note to my younger female readers: if you are ever in what you believe is a romantic relationship with an older person who is consciously hoping that the people with whom you are seen in public suppose you are parent and child, you are likely in the wrong relationship.
He ordered us both something on the menu called the Webster’s Plate, which was a piece of filet mignon carved into the shape of a large dinner roll, but flat enough on top for a couple of Alaskan king crab legs to perch, the surf and turf then smothered in béarnaise sauce.
It came with a baked potato slit open and packed with sour cream, bacon, and an angioplasty.
This was lunch. There are good reasons few of us eat like we did in 1978.
Once the waiter had left us alone, Theo leaned into me, his breath peppermint because once I had told him I liked peppermint—he thought this suggested an adult palate on my part, and I basked in that approval—and said, “You make me very happy. I’m glad you’re here, even if these are not the best of circumstances.
” My breath, I know, was minty, too. I wanted to bring up the main reasons why I was here, but like a boxer he danced away from each parry and jab, a joke here, an aside there, an observation about our secluded nook, what he called our “culinary safe house.”
Only when lunch arrived did he get serious. When the server had exited, Theo said ruminatively, “So, Nick Foster saw us at the hotel.”
He was wearing a charcoal-gray pinstripe suit with a red paisley tie.
For a man who was, more or less, the age of both my father and my mother’s lover, he always looked young to me.
Or younger. He had what I had come to call Jack Nicklaus hair.
Surfer hair. Blond and invariably tousled.
There were lines on his face, but the sort you would see on a golfer who spent hours and hours on the links.
“Yes, he did,” I agreed. “I’m a little scared. Should we be worried?”
“Has Nick said anything yet?” he asked, knowing that, at least so far, Nick hadn’t.
“No.”
He dipped a piece of a crab’s leg into the sauce as if he were eating fondue. “Not sure who he would tell or why. What’s to be gained by telling anyone?”
“But you did want to see me today,” I reminded him. Translation: But you’re anxious, too.
He finished chewing, dabbed at his lips with his napkin.
“If I can reassure you that you needn’t fret about Nick Foster, that’s a bonus.
But I wanted to see you because I care about you and I know you’re a very empathetic person, and I understand how upset you are about what happened to Kenny Foster.
Which is natural. But I want to make sure you understand that you’re not a monster.
Obviously. And—and this is important, Mira—you’re a victim, too. ”
“Not on the scale of Kenny Foster, I’m not.”
“Fair. The guy who has one leg isn’t as bad off as the guy who has none. I get it. But that doesn’t mean the guy with one leg isn’t a cripple, too.”
(Cripple. We don’t use that word anymore, do we?)
I nodded. I knew I was broken, and I knew it was bad. But his acknowledgment that I was crippled—not precisely the right word, but one that in 1978 was at least moving in the right direction—was ground that my parents, my brother, and my friend Marie had studiously avoided.
“Fate doesn’t care about any of us,” he went on. “Not you, not me. Not poor Kenny Foster.” Abruptly, he motioned at my plate. “You’re not eating. Do you not like king crab? Or is it the béarnaise?”
“I really haven’t had much of an appetite the last few days.”
He put his hand on mine, rubbing the soft bay of flesh between my thumb and forefinger.
“Again, that’s probably a sign of pretty solid mental health.
What kind of person would you be if you weren’t moved by Kenny’s death?
But, just so you know, it’s not a sign you’re a villain to appreciate a really exquisite béarnaise even when Fate, capital F, has decided to—pardon my French—fuck you over for no apparent reason.
But the fact is, alas, that’s how Fate gets its jollies. ”
I looked at his fingers on mine. It was his right hand. No ring.
“I liked him. I wish I’d gotten to know him better.”
“The fact you didn’t is no reason to punish yourself. Were you ever mean to him?”
“No.”
“As I suspected. I wouldn’t be with you, Mira, if you were the kind of person who was mean to the new kid.”
That last sentence. Was I supposed to take pride in it? Yes. I yearned for his approval, and he knew it.
“I wish the church had been overflowing—for Mr. and Mrs. Foster,” I murmured.
“I’m sure they were oblivious to crowd size. Did Nick speak?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?” asked Theo.
“I wasn’t able to pay attention. I kept staring at the casket. At Kenny.”
“He didn’t mention you, I am sure of that. No father would.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“See? He doesn’t blame you. He’s probably even a little worried about you as a parent. A decent parent. I don’t know Nick—I know his car with its ridiculous signs on the sides, like he’s a plumber—but I suspect he’s a stand-up guy.”
All you’re hearing in that response is privilege and condescension.
You are focused on his aside, his snarky remark about the car, the diminishment of plumbing as a profession.
Take a step back. Hear in your head his response in its entirety.
Lurking inside that observation, there it is: Nick Foster’s motivation for my undoing.
For Theo’s undoing. For the end of the two of us as us.
I had told Theo at lunch that I wasn’t going to Yale.
I’d said that I might apply to Smith and leave for college a year later, and I was clear with him that my reasons for considering Northampton were that I was done with golf and that it would be harder for us to see each other.
Killing Kenny Foster was my punishment for fucking a married man my parents’ age: in the magical thinking madhouse in which I was living now, they were connected.
And the idea that it was Kenny Foster’s father who had seen Theo and me together seemed the absolute proof of a karmic connection and a retributive God.
Theo said he thought Smith was a fine idea for a variety of reasons and I shouldn’t play golf if it no longer made me happy.
But he reminded me that he traveled for work and he could travel as easily to western Massachusetts as he could central Connecticut.
He even had a client in Pittsfield, not that far west of Northampton.
With levelheaded charm he expressed his disappointment in losing me and how much we needed each other, and how he could provide the intellectual guidance born of his experience and the comfort born of our absolute familiarity.
“Don’t lose yourself in Mira Land,” he said.
He knew the term’s origins and how the expression had come to mean (at least for me) going down the rabbit hole of self-hatred because of nonsensical connections.
Sure, the world was always a mess and as mere mortals we endured its capriciousness as best we could, but I was preternaturally capable of creating illogical linkages.
My cause-and-effect scenarios ignored the laws of science.
His charisma worked. After lunch, he took me to that hotel we preferred.
Or, I guess, he preferred. I was eighteen and still found all hotels interesting, glamorous, and fun. There we fucked, and we fucked hard, neither of us suspecting that it was the last time.
Of course, the reality that it was the last time was not a testimony to my willpower to resist the charms of a management consultant with surfer hair. It was a testimony to the fact that Nick Foster was indeed a decent parent and—as Theo had said—a stand-up guy.