The Testing of Luther Albright Read online

  I didn’t say anything.

  She looked up at me. “So what do you do if you’re not a plumber?”

  She picked up her juice box and took another sip. It was annoying, but it seemed peevish not to answer her question.

  I said, “I’m a civil engineer.”

  She stared at me blankly. She was holding me hostage again, asking me questions instead of ringing me up. I said, “I design dams.”

  She grinned. She was clearly waiting for me to ask what was funny about this, but for some reason it felt critically important not to. My resistance didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest. She said, “You’re going to need a lot of Drano for a clog like that.” Then she turned and ran the credit card through the template.

  When she handed me the slip, she held it down for me with those chipped fingernails. It would again have seemed absurdly testy to pull the slip out from under them and hold it for myself, but that is what I wanted to do. Instead, I signed it quickly and she picked it up to separate the copies. She held one out for me, but not very far, so that I had to reach for it.

  “Bye-bye, Luther Albright,” she said.

  Then she turned back to her TV.

  IT SEEMED RIGHT TO ME TO ASK ELLIOT TO ADMINISTER THE test. Somehow I was already certain the path of this problem would lead us to examining his work in the attic, and I felt any respect for his abilities I could demonstrate along the way would counterbalance this. So it was that I found myself crouched in the grass beside him again, checking for signs of decay in my house.

  When he lit the first bomb, the air filled with a singed smell and he set it inside the cleanout. Then he switched on the pump, which was loud, like a hair dryer, and fit the nozzle inside the pipe behind the bomb.

  “What next?” he said.

  “We have to wait at least ten minutes for the smoke to fill the pipes. If there’s a crack, the smoke will work its way into the walls and out into the room around the switch plates and doorjambs.”

  “And if there’s not?”

  “We won’t see any smoke inside the house.”

  “Where will it come out?”

  “The vent stack. On the roof.”

  He looked up to indicate his bet. I ignored this.

  I said, “I think I’ll go inside and have a bite to eat while we wait.”

  He made no move to join me, and I didn’t try to lure him. Alone in the kitchen, I took a mason jar of mixed nuts from the windowsill and sat down at the table facing a wall, hoping to see the smoke that would reveal a freak cause. The summer I worked for my father he had gone to a convention in Atlantic City, and he came back with plumbing mysteries of various kinds. For trap-seal loss, there was the story of a squirrel that had crawled down the vent stack and could not turn around to escape. As he struggled over the next few days, his body position from time to time occluded the passage completely, causing siphoning in one or more fixtures. The problem was not diagnosed until, after several days of struggle, the squirrel died and produced a smell distinct from the sewage stench the trap-seal loss had caused.

  Although he must have known from the way I pored over my plumbing manual that I would have been interested in this story, it was days before he got around to telling it. When he first returned from the trip, all he seemed to want to talk about was what the attendees had done with their evening hours. There had been a show, apparently, with dancers who wore very little but sequined body stockings and feathers like exotic birds, and my father had a picture of himself with one of these dancers. My mother laughed when she saw the photo, not in a mean-spirited way, but as if she thought that was what had been intended, and her laughter seemed to make my father angry. “That’s good, Lucille,” he said. “Most of the wives don’t see it that way. They’d be afraid their husbands would run off with dancers.” Then he slipped the photo into the frame of a mirror that hung in our living room where it still sat, curling at its free edge, when I went home years later for his funeral.

  It was a posed picture, clearly the kind of thing men stand in line to get, and that performers offer grudgingly, checking a clock between shots to see how soon they’ll be free to enjoy themselves, but when he’d first shown it to us I was too young to know this, and it seemed a remarkable thing. In my early boyhood, my father had been devoted to my mother. Like Belsky, he had never bothered to hide his appreciation of other women’s looks, but it was a clear escalation of this self-indulgence to hint at the possibility of infidelity. And if anything could be more selfish than joking about lust in front of your wife, it would be allowing your adolescent son, who is no doubt wrestling with such urges for the first time himself, to witness this same hint of how destructive they can be.

  But I was allowing myself to become distracted. This was happening more often as Elliot typed out his draft, and each time it seemed a weakening of my resolution to keep such stories to myself. I put the jar of nuts back on the windowsill and got up and wandered the house, scanning for plumes of smoke. Basement, front hall, laundry room, up the stairs into our bedroom, our closet, our bath. Warring impulses had kept Liz from transforming Elliot’s old bedroom completely. It was tidy, and the drawers had been cleared for guests, but it still had his old bedspread, and a poster of cars through the decades on the wall. I headed upstairs and braced myself for a familiar feeling of dislocation. More and more, his new room in the attic was striking me upon my rare visits as a foreign land. Ticket stubs from an Oakland Raiders game. Soda cans from a drink called Squirt. There was the swimsuit calendar on the wall that I remembered, but now there were dirty dishes that seemed unlike him to leave out, and, even more conspicuous, through the open doorway of the bathroom he had built, hanging over the shower curtain rod, a pair of girl’s underpants.

  I should say in defense of my insight that I knew right away that he intended I see these, but it seemed to me that the response he was testing for was some expression of distrust, or disrespect, or paternal misunderstanding of the adult he was becoming and the privacy that he felt should be his right. I imagined what my own father would have done, which was to say something crude that at once showed a galling assumption on his part that he understood what I wanted from intimacy with a girl, and that also belittled whatever more complex relationship the presence of her underwear implied; this, or quick outrage at the sneaking around that was only one possible explanation for how they’d made their way into my room. Now, standing in Elliot’s bathroom, to my utter surprise I felt the easy rise of these same assumptions and this outrage, and it was partly due to shame at this unexpected kinship with my father that I decided I would not comment on the underpants at all.

  The window behind them was wide open, and I knew this was for my benefit as well. When I leaned out to look up the roofline, smoke was streaming out the vent pipe and Elliot sat next to the chimney, eating an apple.

  The dormers sit about four feet above the eave and the roof rises at an angle of thirty-five degrees. Unless it’s raining, it is not unreasonably treacherous to climb out the window, but somehow it was something it had never occurred to me that he might do. In addition to the distraction of the panties, it may in part have been embarrassment about my nervousness at seeing him in so vulnerable a place that made me act as if there was nothing unusual about his location, but I see now that this was probably a letdown as well. I climbed out after him as if I myself had done it before, keeping a hand on the eave of the dormer as I worked my way up to the ridge and settled next to him on the damp shingles. When I did, Elliot wrapped his napkin around the apple core and crumpled it. He pulled his two hands back just above his right shoulder like a basketball player and held it there a moment. Then he pushed up and cocked his wrist to release it, and it disappeared down the chimney.

  It was a strange thing to have done, disrespectful and provocative and too-unimportant-to-be-upset-about all at once, and I decided right away I would say nothing about this either.

  Our neighbor was trying to start the mower in his yard. One pu
ll. Two pulls. Three. It was a relief, finally, hearing the motor whine.

  “So what do you think?” Elliot said.

  It may have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that recently he had asked a lot of questions that could be interpreted in any number of ways: some dice-throw kind of effort to see what I might reveal. Although it was very likely he was talking about the cause of the trap loss, and not the underpants or the apple core, I didn’t take this for granted.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “Design flaw maybe.” His tone was innocent, but I had difficulty believing he was not aware of the slight embedded in his guess. I waited a second before responding so I could keep the trace of irritation from my voice.

  “Could be. It probably would have caused more than one failure in all these years though.”

  “What then?”

  Immediately, I pictured him working alone in the attic, bare-chested and bobbing to angry music, fitting the vent to the studs behind his wall. I pictured this, and then I told him the story about the squirrel.

  He furrowed his brow. “You think there’s a squirrel in there?”

  “No, no.” We rarely saw squirrels in our neighborhood. “I’m just saying weird things can happen.”

  “So what do you think caused it?”

  He was squinting now, his jaw set in an expression of disdainful mock confusion. It would have been easy, and I’m ashamed to admit, sort of satisfying, to wipe the look from his face by pointing out that by far the most likely cause was his own adolescent sloppiness. But in a feat of paternal empathy I would briefly count among my greatest, I said: “A temporary clog.”

  “But we didn’t see anything backing up.”

  “It may have cleared spontaneously on its own after it siphoned the trap.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Wait and see if it happens again.”

  “I thought you said it was dangerous.”

  “It is. It can be. We’re going to keep all the windows open until we’ve diagnosed it.”

  He regarded me and held my gaze as if to break it—thirty seconds; sixty. Then he laughed through his nose. “You’re not even going to ask me about it, are you?”

  “About what?” I said.

  “The girl’s underwear in my bathroom.”

  I paused. I have since thought of a few better answers to this, like “I trust you,” or “You’re old enough to make your own choices,” but at the time what came to me was, “Not unless you want to talk to me about it, no.”

  As we spoke, he’d been watching the smoke stream from the vent, and when I said this, he did an amazing thing. With both hands gripping the chimney crown, he stood and then leapt around it in the air. The fraction of time for which he hovered there, grounded only by his hands, was a long one, and the sound that came out of me was most similar to the bark of a small dog. I scrambled to the chimney and stood to reach out for him, and when he landed on the other side, his bare feet straddling the ridge cap, I was gripping his shoulders with whitened fingers. Our faces were so close that when he began, suddenly, to laugh, his breath was hot against my lips. I pulled him towards me, and he stepped cooperatively around the chimney.

  We sat down and looked out over our neighborhood. I had to catch my breath. I raised my arms discreetly to let the breeze cool the damp part of my shirt. On the steaming surface of a swimming pool a neighbor kept hot year-round, the head of a pale bird dog bobbed earnestly after two children on a rubber raft. They called to it as they paddled away, goading it along. It went on this way, the dog paddling after until the children reached a wall at the deep end of the pool and pulled the raft out of the water. The dog scrambled against the wall, and the larger of the two children tugged on its collar until, in some way, their end was met, and they collapsed on the chilly lawn at the patio’s edge, grasping their thick towels around them. For a moment, I could not take my eyes from their rest. Something about it. Their bodies would leave sweet imprints in the grass.

  “Well,” I said finally.

  “Should we go inside?” he said.

  “I think so.”

  We turned towards the dormer, and he motioned me to go first. As I crouched to ease myself towards the window, he laughed again and touched my shoulder, and I turned to catch the look on his face.

  He smiled at me. “I’ve never seen you do that before.”

  “What would that be?” I said.

  “Yelp.”

  THAT NIGHT, LIZ SAT UP IN BED, LOOKING THROUGH ELLIOT’S high school face book and watching the local news. The aftershock had resuscitated all of the most absurd of the producers’ ideas: interviews with insurance underwriters, demonstrations of earthquake safety products. I stood beside the bed and looked down at the page of children’s faces. Elliot’s photograph was slightly blurry, as if he had noticed something off camera at the last moment, his eyes sliding to the right.

  She said, “It sounded like he had fun today.”

  “It did,” I said.

  He had come home late again that night, this time with grass stains on his shirt from a game of touch football in their yard. Through questions about the rules and how teams had been chosen, she had drawn it out of him quickly: Belsky himself had not played.

  She turned a page of the face book, but she glanced at me again, waiting, I suspected, for me to ask about the pictures she was seeking: Peggy maybe, or Tim. In the last month, her manner of interacting with me had changed. She had fewer questions, and although most of the time I believed that this was because she was finding the fulfillment I’d intended for her with more willing patients, a part of me worried that her conversational pauses and lingering gazes were “passive assistance” techniques she’d learned at the Crisis Center. The idea annoyed me, and this feeling towards her was so unfamiliar that each time it surfaced, I tried to dismiss it. But the next time our talk strayed to any topic that had preoccupied me, I found I could not shake the idea that I was the secret object of her eager, clinical pity.

  Through the open windows, we heard a crash and clatter: our neighbor hefting a sack of garbage into the metal can by his garage, the sound as clear as if I were holding the lid open for him. He coughed. He inhaled sharply. In his room, through his own open windows, I thought, Elliot could hear this as well.

  Liz said, “He really seems to get something out of his time at Tim’s house.”

  She looked at me, and here I was meant, I could see, to ask what she thought that might be. So I did.

  She said, “More kids. A hot tub.” She smiled. “The unfamiliar spectacle of parents fighting with each other.”

  And I touched her hair in answer so she would not say more to comfort me.

  I stepped into our closet to change for bed. Half of our hanging clothes were left open to the air, but I had enclosed a section at either end in a redwood cabinet lined with cedar to protect them from moths. We kept these cabinets closed, but the hot, dry smell of these panels still escaped them. It was a refreshing, but somehow tiring smell—one I savored when I entered but was always glad to leave. When Liz was pregnant with Elliot, she was sick in the evenings and said the smell of cedar settled her stomach. One day I came home and found her asleep on the carpeted floor, her head between open cabinet doors, and that night I moved the thin mattress from our sleeper sofa into the closet. We slept there every night until her second trimester.

  When I came out again, the reporter had turned the news back over to the anchorman, a tall man with dark hair parted whitely. All that week, the last two minutes of news had been devoted to aftershock effects, and today he told the story of a school in Citrus Heights where two acoustical tiles had loosened and dropped from ceiling to desktop. I could picture these tiles: white, formed of mineral fiber, too light to do anything but surprise, but still the solemn description of the incident. The camera panned slowly across the ceiling to the hole where the tiles had been.

  “Ha,” I said.

  “More pseudo-calami
ty?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  When I slipped into bed, her body did not shift or rise. I was a restless sleeper, and years ago I’d purchased separate twin bed mattresses we bound together with a king-sized sheet to mitigate the disturbance caused by my turning, but lately her stillness when I moved seemed freighted with meaning, a blunt symbol in a simple movie. When we made love now, she was more athletic—a kind of compensation—but she no longer whispered. She was watching the news now, but I saw that while I dressed she had turned the face book to a picture of Tim. He stood somehow closer to the camera than the other students, so that his head was larger than those above and below it on the page.

  “There’s also the driving,” she said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Reasons for Elliot hanging out there instead of here.” She turned away from the TV screen to face me. “Riding around with Tim like that. Maybe he even lets Ellie drive.”

  I had thought of this too, of course. It was illegal for a learner’s-permit holder to drive without an adult present, but I doubted this would matter to him.

  I said, “I think he’ll probably take his test next month.”

  “Do you think he’ll be ready?”

  “I do.”

  For my own driver’s test, I had taken my father’s service van to the DMV. He had not used it in months. My mother was with me, and after I got my license, I drove us along the turnpike all the way to the Lincoln Tunnel. Although the drive took more than an hour, she never once asked me where I was going or suggested we turn home. She was quiet next to me, but this wasn’t strange. Instead, I had the impression that she was in fact hoping I would drive farther—that her fate was in my hands. At the same time, I knew that were I to speak aloud the possibility of driving far or missing dinner with him, she would tell me to turn around that instant. Our freedom seemed fragile, predicated on not speaking, and so I did not acknowledge the strangeness of the accumulation of missed exits, or of the growing Manhattan skyline as we went around bends in the turnpike. There was never at any point in the drive any real possibility of leaving, but in our silence, I felt our mutual desire for it, and the unspoken fantasy I was sure we shared was the closest we had ever come to discussing our disappointment. It made my chest light. Only the terror of passing the narrow underwater lanes of the tunnel with all the nervous twitches of a new driver could begin to dispel this. Then the stoplight on Dyer Avenue, the sudden stillness among honking horns and buildings taller than any I had ever seen; it was a splash of cold water for us both. My mother smoothed the lap of her skirt. “The end of the line,” she said lightly; she smiled but could not look at me, and for this, it played like an epitaph for what we had just shared; “It’s time to go home.”