The Testing of Luther Albright Read online

  Liz shifted beneath her sheets, and her bare leg touched me. She smelled like soap. With the windows open, sound carried in the air above our yard to his room. It was an inhibition, but sadly it was not the only one.

  “Will you want to go with him?” she said.

  She meant to his driver’s test. Suddenly I did want to, very much, but courtesy had begun to curdle our exchanges. I said, “What about you?”

  “Maybe we should both go.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  She drifted off quickly, but dozens of times that night I woke with a start to the thought of the seven gaping windows on the first floor with a kind of panic I had learned from my mother. Liz did not seem to share this. The few times Elliot had asked to spend nights at other boys’ houses, she’d said yes without even knowing where they lived. It was my job at night to close all our windows and set the burglar alarm, and on my rare business trips I would call before bed to find that in my absence she hadn’t bothered. I had built my staircase with a precision-routed stringer and a generous bead of construction adhesive to keep the treads from squeaking and then added a thick runner that muffled the impact of any passage. Through an open first-floor window, I thought, a man could make it into Elliot’s bedroom without notice. Under the shield of these night sounds, he could creep into my own room and put a knife to my wife’s throat while I slept.

  On Monday morning, I called Pacific Security. For a twenty percent rush fee, the serviceman who came to measure our windows returned just a few days later with a full set of custom screens and interfaced each one with a short flexible cord to a contact on the sills. I drifted in and out of rooms where he worked, hoping he would finish before my wife and son got home. But he did not hurry. He took a stick of gum from his pocket and explained that the mesh was interlaced with thin wires that would detect cutting. He sat back and wiped his brow with a handkerchief from his back pocket; the sill contacts would detect removal, he said. Liz and Elliot both returned as he reprogrammed the keypad, paging slowly through a manual in our front hall. Then he tested it twice, filling the house with an urgent blaring while I stood behind him, oddly shamed by the noise. After he left, I went into the kitchen, where Liz stood at the sink washing lettuce for a salad, and Elliot sat at the table flipping through a magazine.

  I felt the urge to reclaim something.

  “There,” I said. “Now we can protect ourselves from gas poisoning AND prowlers.” When nobody laughed, I said, “We’ll just keep the windows open a couple more weeks as a precaution.”

  Elliot turned a page, but I could tell he was listening. I said, “Then, if it doesn’t recur, I think we can safely assume the smell was caused by a temporary clog.”

  I STILL THINK IT’S ODD THAT I DIDN’T ANTICIPATE WHAT happened next. I was at my desk in my vast new office, trying to make sense of a junior engineer’s rambling memo about the pedestal design for Bottlerock, when my telephone rang.

  “Luther, hi. It’s Sylvia de Silva.”

  I couldn’t place her name, but it sounded vaguely familiar, and I didn’t want to insult her: “Yes,” I said. “Hello.”

  “You were the designer for North Fork, right?”

  I rarely interacted with anyone outside the engineering group, and at that point, I figured she was an administrator of some sort. Or someone in Accounting. Belsky had just submitted a proposal for budgeting on some new tests. “I managed the design, yes.”

  “And you’re doing the investigation?”

  “Robert Belsky’s doing most of the work, but I’m supporting it.”

  There was a small pause. Then: “So, how’s it going?”

  “Fine.”

  “No problems?”

  I heard a leaf of paper turn on her desk and a distant telephone ringing. Belsky hadn’t mentioned a particular person in Accounting, and at that moment I found I couldn’t remember the names of anyone in that department at all.

  I said, “What sort of problems?”

  “Glitches. Surprises of any sort.”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  I heard another page turn, and then another telephone. Then a third began ringing in concert with the second: not the soft warble of the incomprehensible new-fangled system we used inside the Department, I finally noticed. There was a slight rustle, and the sounds of the telephones became muffled.

  “Sylvia, I’m sorry, we’ve probably met, but I don’t remember.”

  “Oh, gee, I’m the one who should be sorry,” she said. “I thought you’d recognize my name. I’m a reporter for the Sacramento Bee.”

  What I felt first was irritation at not anticipating what immediately seemed to have been an obvious and inevitable development. Quickly, however, my shame was displaced by anger. “You thought I’d recognize your name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long have you been reporting on water allocation?”

  “I’ve done several stories.”

  “Then you must know that there are two spokespeople for the Department of Water Resources, and I’m neither of them.”

  It is of course in the best interests of a reporter not to register surprise or allow awkwardness to creep into her manner, and she took this in her stride. I thought I heard the pop and pressurized release of a soda can opening. “Hunh. No, I wasn’t aware. I just thought people would like to hear your perspective on things.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. I thought they’d be curious to know whether you thought it was necessary—whether your dam was sound or needed a little shoring up.”

  “Have you got a pen?”

  “Yeah, sure.” It was more difficult, then, for her to mask her excitement. I heard a rustling again, and then a thump. The conversation had taken an early turn that made her believe I’d say nothing of value, and now it had changed. “Go ahead.”

  I cleared my throat and coughed. “Excuse me, I’m a little congested.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “My wife thinks it’s a cold, but I think it could be a mold allergy.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  I coughed again. “Well,” I said. “Where was I?”

  “You wanted me to write something down.”

  “Oh, right. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” Her impatience was gratifying.

  “Leonard Berkman and Christine White.”

  “Okay.” There was a pause while she wrote this down. “Who are they?”

  I looked out my window at the capitol dome. Then I said, “They’re the spokespeople for the Department,” and I hung up the phone.

  Although it was winter, my new office had so many windows that, by late morning, the room began to overheat. The sun warmed my neck and shirt back and drew odors from the room, and now I was overwhelmed, suddenly, by the smell of banana. Liz sent me to the office each day with a little cooler. She always put a piece of whole fruit inside, which I ate at my desk feeling lucky, but now I bent over my garbage can to find the peel. It was cool and dry, and when I pinched it between my fingers, the vein-work on the inner walls gave and slid and released more of that smell.

  The air by Elena’s desk was oddly refreshing. The faint scents there were discernible to me in some heightened state of sensitivity: hair spray and hot pencil erasers. She made a lot of mistakes, and walked around the office with a telltale dusting of the pink-black rubber filings clinging to the lap of her acetate skirts. The air felt cooler, too, and the noise of typewriters and telephones was welcome. I went to the kitchenette, where a secretary I didn’t recognize was heating a container of leftovers in the microwave. She was humming “The Girl from Ipanema,” and her anonymous company was somehow soothing. I dropped the banana peel in the garbage can and stepped to the window. I rested a hand on the cold steel sill. On the sidewalk below, a mother was attempting to pull a tandem stroller up over the curb. She might have loaded them into it on the sidewalk, or wheeled it along to the corner where the Architectural Barriers Act required
the curb to thin and meet the asphalt, but instead, this struggle. Behind me, the microwave pinged, and the secretary stopped her humming abruptly. The door chucked open, and she said “Voilà” and walked out with her lunch.

  I went down the hall and popped my head in Belsky’s doorway. “I just wanted to warn you about something,” I said.

  He was eating a doughnut, and he raised his eyebrows in a way that called attention to the connotations of reprimand my opener carried. I saw that I should have led with something else: a question about Tim, or another expression of false gratitude for the hospitality he and Joyce were showing my son. But it was too late for that now.

  I said, “A reporter just called me from the Bee. She tried to pretend she was someone I knew to get me to talk about the investigation, but I figured it out before I gave her any comment. Her name is Sylvia de Silva.”

  Standing on my front doorstep to pick up Elliot for water-skiing that first time, he had eyed my house, up and down. Sometimes I thought of this as meaningful, but other times he was just any man on a doorstep. I tried to remind myself that his offer to take Elliot had been a joke.

  I said, “I just wanted you to know who she is. You know—in case she calls you.”

  As I finished my last sentence, he took another bite, and he regarded me while he chewed. When he swallowed, he said, “Thanks.”

  He crumpled his napkin into a ball and then set his hands above his right shoulder. He flicked his wrist and it sailed past me towards his waste can where it landed on the floor next to another.

  “For the warning,” he added.

  Then he looked out the window at the rooftop garage next door.

  My pulse quickened. It was unclear whether he intended that I leave.

  Before I could decide, he said: “That blue Celica’s been parked in that same spot for a month.”

  On the other side of the door, his secretary’s phone rang. He turned back towards me and smiled slightly, waiting for me to comment, but there was no response to this he could not make light of. He knew this. When it had been just long enough to make my speechlessness clear, he winked and said, “I know, because Krepps gave me the better view of the parking lot.”

  THE EVENING MIGHT HAVE GONE DIFFERENTLY IF I HAD BEEN A better predictor, at this point, of what my son would do, but in that respect I think it is clear that I had never had much intuition. I had guessed that he would have pointed questions about my story. So on the way home, tapping the brake pedal in traffic, I had rehearsed answers to these. Then, because I wanted to afford it as little importance as possible, I told them in the kitchen. Liz was generally garrulous, I had noticed, when she came home from the Crisis Center: a little flushed and talking fast and quick to laugh. Counting on this, I did not do it as soon as I arrived home, but instead waited until she finished a story of how she had gone to her hairdresser to touch up Peggy’s cut and he had not recognized her.

  Maybe things went worse because of how entering upon this simple exchange unsettled me. Liz was in the kitchen unwrapping barbecue sandwiches onto our plates. She was only a few sentences into her story, but somehow my small sense of being a bystander in my own kitchen was magnified by the memory of my disorientation the night of her haircut, and the way the quality of Elliot’s attention made me imagine that he and Liz had talked about Peggy since then, maybe even about that underwear, and that if I was right about this Liz had not even tried to share her knowledge with me. I set my briefcase down and took off my suit coat in a weak attempt both to busy myself and to bridge the gap between us, and Liz, in a gesture of courtesy that was at once kind and surprisingly sad, turned a little to include me.

  “He was giving me directions to a place called Counter Culture Cuts when I said, ‘Danny, it’s me, Liz,’ and he almost poked his customer in the cheek with his scissors he was so surprised. He asked all the other stylists over to look at me, and then he told me he could shape it into a soft Dorothy-Hamill-kind-of-thing.”

  Elliot snorted, and she laughed with him.

  She said, “He was flipping through a magazine to show me pictures before I could explain that I liked it. I said, ‘You’re like a small-town barber with your don’t-worry-we-can-fix-its. I just want you to touch it up. I actually want to keep this same cut.’”

  Elliot laughed again, but his eyes shifted towards me, and in hindsight it is sweet I suppose, that his sense of my outsider status made him uncomfortable. But to dispel the awkwardness of this, I said, “Something funny happened to me today too. A reporter called to try to get me to say something interesting about the investigation for an earthquake scare piece. It was like something from a spy movie. She tried to pretend to be somebody I knew.”

  Liz’s eyes grew wide for less than a second. This was worse. Elliot picked a slice of sweet pickle from his plate and popped it in his mouth. Through the open window, we heard an airplane pass overhead. I picked up my plate. “I didn’t fall for it, of course.”

  Liz said, “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her to get her pen ready, and then I gave her the names of the spokespeople.”

  “I love it,” she said.

  We set our plates on the kitchen table. It was damp out, and this made it feel colder than it was. Liz was wearing two sweaters. I slid the window halfway shut, and, as I sat down to eat, I imagined Elliot was ticking through his options. Did it make you angry? Why didn’t you tell her what you thought? He watched Liz lift her fork and then he cut a piece of brisket and put it in his mouth. Just as I was marveling that he was not saying anything to heighten my discomfort, he said, “So, did you ever think of an answer?”

  “Sure, but the point is she’s supposed to talk to the spokespeople.”

  “No,” he said. “Not about that. For that last question for my report.”

  “What question?” Liz said.

  I said, “A time when my father scared me.”

  I still have not sorted out how much of what he did that year was natural, and how much of it was calculated to unseat me with surprise. He took another bite of brisket and watched me as he chewed.

  In the last few days, the truth was I had thought a number of times about his question, and what kept coming to me was the night my father came home and announced that he had been fired.

  “Well, they’re foolish,” my mother had said. She slipped on her oven mitts. “They don’t know what they’re losing.”

  My father had always been prone to quick irritation, and at first the rise in his voice when he spoke next didn’t really strike me as strange. “I got fired because I messed up, Lucille.”

  She dismissed the idea with a mitted hand.

  He said, “I mouthed off like I always do. I’ve got a big mouth, and it finally got me into trouble.”

  “You’re one of his best plumbers.”

  “His best plumbers don’t tell off his customers.”

  She pulled the pot roast from the oven, and when she set it on the stove, he turned her with both hands and took her oven mitts off. He held on to her hands, but low, close to the wrists, and in his eyes there was something beseeching. “How come everything I do gets the same reaction from you? How about if I socked a customer in the nose? How about if I threatened my boss? How about if I ran over Luther with my van?” Their faces were close, and she looked as confused as I was by this flash of desperation, something altogether different than his anger. “I lost my job, Lucille.”

  “I know.”

  “So what are you going to do now I don’t get paid every Friday?”

  “Serve less pot roast,” she said.

  “Serve less pot roast.” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “What’ll you feed Luther if I don’t get a job?”

  “You will. You’re ten times the brain of anyone you’ve worked with. You should start your own outfit.”

  “It takes time to drum up clients. Especially if you’re a jerk.”

  “So?”

  “So what’ll you put on the table till then?”
/>   She smiled. “Eggs, potatoes, and apples.”

  Somehow instead of appreciating her faith and good humor, he received this easy specificity like a slap. He let her hands fall. If his frustration was hurtful to her, she chose not to show it. She smiled again and kissed him on the forehead. She was taller than him, and prone to gestures, I see now, that made him feel it.

  Of course, it was only in hindsight that I was able to recognize this conversation as the catalyst that it was. It seemed to me that there had always been an underlying self-hatred in my father, latent in his temper and his slavery to impulse, which at first drew him to a long-suffering love like my mother’s but was ultimately bound to question it. Sitting at my dinner table with my wife and son, I suppose it is telling that after the initial fear this analysis always stirred in me, I felt the silent rise of a pulse-pounding outrage: not at the weakness behind my father’s insecurity, but at his selfish failure to hide it—the first step along a slippery slope that would give him license to test her over and over with ever-greater assaults on her love. Elliot might be doing the same to me, I admitted—I did understand that—but, unlike my father, he deserved not my anger but my patience. He was only a child, and besides, with one lapse in the attic I had given him reason to doubt the honesty of my emotions.

  Across the table, he was watching me. I picked up my napkin and made a business of wiping my lips.