The Testing of Luther Albright Page 10

  “So what’s he doing here?”

  “He didn’t take it. He quit to start a consulting firm.”

  Within a year he had earned a strong enough reputation to win a small job that had also been bid by Bechtel. Elliot glanced at the men again. Nathan was turned in such a way that he would not see us, and suddenly the contemplation of his success made me grateful for this. He was gesturing wildly, the way he used to in meetings just before he made a point of surprising insight. There was no mistaking these windmilling motions. In meetings they had made me feel superior, but in my son’s company they made me feel self-conscious. I took a sip of my drink. The waiter placed a dish of peanuts on the polished wood table. Elliot asked for another root beer, and when the waiter left, he rotated the ice cubes in his empty glass with his cherry.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course. You can ask me anything.”

  He looked up at me now. “Did what that guy at your office said make you uncomfortable?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Not even a little bit?”

  I leaned forward in my chair. I set my drink on the quilted paper coaster. The opportunity I had been waiting for had come, and I wanted his full attention. “Elliot, I think you’re wonderful. I’ve always thought that. Whenever you make a new choice for yourself, I respect it.”

  “Not about my haircut,” he said. “About your dam.”

  It took me several seconds to even imagine what he meant. “Why would it make me uncomfortable?”

  “Because they’re saying there’s something wrong with your design.”

  “They’re saying they have more information now than when I designed it.”

  “Doesn’t it bug you even a little bit?”

  “Doesn’t what bug me?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head slightly, as if the very sight of me were hard to accept. When he opened them, he was squinting with disgust. “The suggestion that you could have screwed up, Dad. That with all your training and experience you could have spent six years building something that big and that expensive in a way that threatens the safety of tens of thousands of people.”

  It was difficult, at times, to keep his vulnerability firmly in mind. It was clear to me even then that he knew enough about science to understand that a determination of structural deficiency based on data unavailable during design did not indicate an error of expertise or attention on the part of an engineer. Yet, for reasons I could not yet fully fathom, he wanted to pretend that he did not. Behind him, Nathan’s party rose, laughing, to leave the bar, and at the sharp bark of this, Elliot did not even turn his head. He was focused on me, with that special attention, and then, quite suddenly, on a spot on the table I could not trace.

  I said, “If they doubted my competence, Elliot, they wouldn’t have given me the geothermal project. They wouldn’t have just relocated me to the best view corner in the building.”

  But his eyes did not rise, and I had the impression that my voice came to him from a great distance. The false flames of the chandelier were a blur above us. Everything in the room seemed faint next to the glow from his inclined head. He stayed this way a long time, until the waiter came back with his root beer. Then he looked up, and I told him I didn’t want to make Liz wait with our dinner. He took a few sips as I counted out the bills from my wallet, and then we left the lobby for home.

  OUR BEDROOM CLOSET WAS SPLIT DOWN THE CENTER BY A floor-to-ceiling unit of shelves, a feature I had designed to achieve more shelf space without realizing what a strangeness it would introduce into our undressing. We always ended up on either side of this, enjoying a privacy we did not need. When Liz finally asked me how my drink with our son had gone, she was hidden behind these shelves.

  I said, “We went to the lobby of the Capitol Hotel. I told him you’d ordered a boilermaker on our first date there. He liked that.”

  “How on earth do you remember that?”

  “You wore a spangled halter top.”

  She laughed.

  “I didn’t mention that part.”

  She laughed again, invisible. I tried to picture her. In her bra and jeans. Or her blouse and underpants. Barefoot. Blinking at the shelves. She had made sloppy joes and milk shakes for dinner, and when we sat down she had initiated a game in which each of us quoted lines from movies and the others tried to guess their sources. Both of them were good at this, their memories filled with the words of fictional people I could not even remember having seen, and my inability to offer any material or identify even one of the lines they repeated was the subject of a lot of joking. His laughter seemed a magic trick, and my mind returned to that moment when Belsky had called attention to his hair, but I forced it away. In the car on the way home from the bar, he had been quiet, and I had taken the opportunity to try to think through how I would share what had passed between us with Liz. Now I heard the wicker of our laundry hamper flex, and she stepped around the shelves: PTA T-shirt and underpants.

  “So??” she said.

  “So what?”

  She rolled her eyes. “What did you talk about?”

  “Different things.”

  “Such as?”

  I knew something important hung in the balance, but the thought of telling her how contemptuously he had challenged me filled me with panic. It seemed to me that Elliot’s happiness had been her main consolation in our marriage, and each new twist of his behavior was persuading me that the responsibility for his teenage angst was mine.

  I shrugged. “Such as what you ordered on our second date. Such as a guy in the bar I used to know.”

  Her shoulders fell. “Do you feel better at least?”

  “About what?” I said, although of course I knew what she meant.

  She closed her eyes. Even then, I felt sorry for her. When she opened them, she reached up and took my face in her hands and stood on her toes to kiss me on the forehead. “How was work today then?”

  “Good.”

  “Any pissing from Belsky?”

  “I didn’t see him much.”

  “That must have been nice,” she said, and she turned away to pick up her jeans. As she stuffed them in the hamper, I wondered if she might be fighting back tears, but she did not let me see her face again until we got into bed. For the first time in our marriage except during a war or a natural disaster, she turned on our bedroom TV, and I watched with her aimlessly—the end of Fantasy Island, the eleven o’clock news, Johnny Carson’s monologue—stealing looks at her face in the flickering glow until she drifted off to sleep.

  After our wedding we had moved her things from her parents’ house into my apartment in the bed of my green Ford for a life I saw now as very different from the one she’d wanted. At first, my hesitation to have children had seemed almost to please her—as if my relief at her patience and understanding were their own reward. With every blockade to intimacy, my fears and inhibitions were making of her marriage a more challenging and noble occupation, but her fantasy of tumbling the high walls of my hesitation did not last. I can count the harsh expressions of disappointment she made during our marriage on one hand, and in every case they came during the two years when I stalled and evaded her suggestions that we start a family. I had lain awake many nights worrying silently that I might lose her, until finally it dawned on me that despite all my fear about becoming a father, a child might at least distract her from her discontent. And so he had, but lying beside her now with the Tonight Show Band playing “Johnny’s Theme,” it struck me suddenly that it was not only Elliot’s adolescent judgment I should fear, or his scrutiny, or even his loss, but also how his growing and leaving us alone together would resuscitate Liz’s dissatisfaction with me.

  This is all I have to explain the choice I made then. When the idea came to me, it seemed a gift—an obvious solution that would be as much of a salvation to her as it was a relief to me—but a more enlightened part of me was ju
st frightened enough of its potential to make me hesitate. I turned the TV off, because it seemed to me the conversation would be easier to have without that flickering glow to illuminate our faces, and when I did, ghost colors swam before my eyes. In the sudden quiet, I could hear the soft click of her tongue that meant deep dreams. My heart was like a bird behind my ribs. I could not make myself touch her.

  “Liz,” I whispered.

  Her breathing was steady.

  I said it louder: “Liz.”

  She gasped and shifted, pulling the sheets. “What?”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “What?”

  Everything seemed so still, suddenly.

  She said, “What is it, sweetheart?”

  I said, “I think this week you should go to the Crisis Center and sign up to be a counselor.”

  For a few seconds, she didn’t say anything, but it was dark, so I couldn’t see her face.

  Then she said, “Why?”

  “You’ve wanted to a long time. It’s a noble impulse, and I think you’d be good at it.”

  “Why now, I mean?”

  “Why not?”

  Even in the dark, I knew the face and posture that went with the sigh she made. She said, “I mean why did you wake me up to tell me?”

  Again the crazy beating. I said, “I was just thinking about what you said last week about Elliot leaving home soon. About leaving the nest…”

  She waited.

  “And about what you’ll do when he’s gone.”

  “Us,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Not me, us.”

  I was too confused to even formulate a question.

  Her voice was sharp in the dark. “I said, ‘What will we do when he’s gone?’ I said, ‘What will we talk about?’”

  “Right. Sure,” I said. “Us.”

  She waited. Not moving. There were no sounds at all in the house.

  I was still blunt to the plain truths of my failings as a spouse, but something in the quality of her silence filled me with panic. I groped for words that would make the suggestion seem the tender encouragement I had hoped it could seem. “The point is, I think you enjoy helping people,” I began. It wasn’t until I’d heard myself say it out loud that it became clear how hurtful my explanation would be: “Volunteering would give you something to do.”

  4 The Roof

  AS WE CROSSED THE LAWN, I FOUND MYSELF FALLING BEHIND, a fugitive of his scrutiny and a spy. In the two months since our drink at the Capitol Hotel, he had grown his hair back, and it had come in differently than I remembered—darker, and also somehow finer. He opened the driver’s-side door, and I walked around the tailgate and marveled at the strange turn of events that placed me here, my son’s passenger in my own car. When Belsky had failed, as I knew he would, to follow up on his invitation to take Elliot water-skiing, for my son’s sake I had asked him to make it real, and since then Elliot had spent afternoons at their house a dozen times. Belsky’s eldest son, Tim, had his license and the keys to a 1974 Ford Pinto. This is how I found myself attempting to teach my son to drive.

  In the night, a heavy fog had descended on our valley, and although it was clear now, the windows were still filmed with a fine mist of condensation. From inside the car, we couldn’t see out in any direction. As he reached for the rearview mirror, I expected him to notice this, but his adjustment was quick, almost sloppy, and he put the key in the ignition and turned it. Then he laid his hand on the back of my seat as I had taught him to do, looked over his shoulder, and shifted the car into reverse.

  Although I was usually able to restrain myself, I turned my head too. Three rivulets of water had drawn lines in the thick film of mist. Through them, I could see the green of our neighbor’s front lawn and nothing more. We began to roll backwards, and I felt a pinch of heat beneath my arms.

  Elliot braked abruptly and laughed. “Geez, Dad!”

  He set the parking brake and got out, leaving his door open. A breeze filled the front seat. He pulled the arm of his sweatshirt over his hand and wiped the windows down with broad strokes, leaving a scalloped border of mist around their edges. When he got back in the car, he was still shaking his head. “Weren’t you going to say anything?”

  “I wasn’t worried.”

  “I’m thinking, Here we go. I’m going. I’m backing up.”

  “I knew I was in good hands.”

  He laughed through his nose and released the brake. This kind of prank had been common since we had begun his driving lessons. He seemed to expect me to doubt his competence, and although he’d made me nervous more than once, I’d controlled the urge to warn him. When we reached the Catholic church parking lot where we had been practicing K-turns, there was a gardening truck directly behind us and a bicycle was making its way down the sidewalk towards the driveway, and Elliot turned into the lot without signaling. I was considering saying something about at least this when he said, “I’ve got one more question for you.”

  “What’s that?”

  He pulled into a spot by the rectory door. A rough draft of his biography paper was due the following week, and the truth is I was looking forward to the lull this might provide. I was glad he was learning to manage a long-term project, and his teacher had done her best to break it up by dividing the work into three six-week phases, but his questions had not really subsided after he’d finished the outline of his research. In the last two months, I had sometimes wondered if the questions he asked were even for his paper. In fact, if I am being honest, I sometimes had the temptation to telephone Mrs. Parks on some pretext to learn whether the assignment had ever truly been changed to require focus on an ancestor.

  He threw an arm over the back of the bench seat, his hands inches from my shoulder. It might have seemed affectionate, but his eyes weren’t looking at me. They were on the space behind him where any driving instructor should want them to be.

  He backed up slowly. “I need to know about a time when your dad scared you,” he said, and he braked and shifted into drive again.

  The parking lot was empty. There was a church service program stuck to the pavement by rain.

  “Your teacher asked you to include this?”

  “Yeah.” He pulled forward.

  “Every student is to include a segment on the frightening behavior of an ancestor?”

  “That’s right.”

  He shifted into reverse and backed into the space he’d left along the hedge.

  I said, “How did she phrase it? What exactly did she tell you to do?”

  “She said to make sure we got a full picture of the subject. We should ask our primary sources about bad behavior as well as good deeds.”

  He threw a hand over the seat again. I looked in the side mirror, waiting for his reversal. When it didn’t come, I turned to see that this time he was in fact looking not at the space behind him, or the stretch of asphalt ahead, but instead at me. The corners of his mouth turned up.

  I said, “I thought you were doing a K-turn.”

  “I did it already.”

  “Another one, I mean.”

  He coughed into his fist—a fake cough designed to relieve tension: mine. Then he said, “You don’t have to answer now if you don’t want to.”

  “No, no. It just seemed a little odd, is all.”

  “We can talk about it at dinner—”

  “Let me just think a minute….”

  “Really, Dad. I’d rather have you come up with a good one than make up something lame or evasive on the fly.”

  And with that, he shifted into drive and carried me back onto the road.

  When he was late for dinner that night, I was at first grateful, but after twenty minutes, I sat down at the kitchen table where through parted curtains I had a view of the cul-de-sac. I opened the newspaper. “Drought in Ethiopia.” “Artificial Heart Still Pumping.” It wasn’t the first time in the last month he’d been late, and although this should have made it easier tonight
, so far each time was just as difficult as the first. This was something elemental, I was beginning to see, to parenting an older child. Even at a distance of yards, each step away was a fresh shock.

  For example, looking back, I am bewildered, even a little embarrassed, by my surprise when, just after Christmas, he had asked if he could move into the attic. The remodel had been his idea, he had worked hard on it, suggested the addition of a bathroom at the last minute, and he was a teenager whose small bedroom shared a wall with his parents’ and opened onto a stairwell that carried even the faintest radio noise all the way to the kitchen. “I was thinking…,” he had said. “I mean, I already do my homework upstairs, and you and Mom don’t really use it.” I knew right away what he was going to say—was in fact already feeling stupid for not having anticipated it—and although immediately I saw that I would say yes, a tightness in my chest made me pretend for more than a minute to believe he merely meant he wanted to use some of the attic for storage.

  When I finally conceded, I did not feel much, but I had imagined stalling would be possible in the logistics of it—the purchase of a different bed or the installation of a hanging rod in the closet for his shirts. As it turned out, he was happy to live a life split between rooms until these details were resolved. He kept his clothes downstairs and slept on the attic couch until his new bed was delivered, and I felt foolish as I watched the delivery men heft it up the stairs. A new bed was obviously not a necessity, but once I had used the suggestion to delay, I could hardly make this point. There were blinds for the dormer windows, which shone two bright squares on his bed at six A.M.; a low bureau that fit the height of the knee wall; new bedsheets. In the end, the move upstairs cost almost nine hundred dollars. Although on principle this probably should have formed some part of my hesitation, the fact is, it was something much simpler. My stomach felt light at the thought of him moving farther up the stairwells of my house, his footsteps mere taps above our bed and altogether traceless from the kitchen, as if this move were a late stage in the rising-and-vanishing that has been the cartoon representation of all the fears I was granted on the day he was born.