The Testing of Luther Albright Read online

  “After the first trick for any group,” he said, “you can see in their eyes what they want more of. Do they want the pure surprise of a rabbit from a hat, or to have their cynicism snuffed by helping with a card trick they thought they could figure, or to feel a scary mix of empathy and brutality bubble up while they watch a friend trust me with knives?” He sipped his 7-Up. He was wearing a cable-knit sweater, but he had a handlebar mustache that helped me to picture it. He said, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, and I’ll tell you there’s still nothing like it.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “The joy of surprising them with what they want.”

  When the boys were cross-legged in the grass, he had appeared, not from the kitchen door, but from the limb of a tree above them. He was wearing a cape with a collar that stood up, which I would have guessed would strike a lame note with boys that age, but there was something about the shock of his descent from the tree that earned their respect before he had even done any magic. They were alternately slack-jawed and laughing the kind of wide-eyed, gasping laugh that signals amusement not at the humor of a performer but at the improbability of the feelings he has managed to stir inside them. When the show was over, he asked if they had any questions, and, as I’m sure he predicted, the first was about the methods behind a certain trick. He nodded gravely and asked them to come close, and they stumbled over one another for position.

  He took out his deck of cards and fanned them out, faceup. “I start with them spread like this, see? Then I turn the fan over, like this, to show you their backs, and when I flip them over again, that’s where the gimmick comes in,” he said. He paused here, and by doing so, allowed me to feel the tension he’d produced. The boys’ eyes did not stray from the cards or his hands. When he flipped them back, finally, all of the cards were blank. “Shucks,” he said, “I guess I’ll have to show you another time,” and what I saw on every boy’s face was not irritation but a kind of relief. The magician closed the deck, smiling.

  For almost a month after the party, Elliot had sat at tables with a deck of cards. He checked out a book at the library. He spent his allowance on a kit that came with a set of metal rings and a wand, and he wore its dark cape. I was no longer envious of the fathers who had planned his friends’ parties, but something worse had replaced it. One night Liz found me by the living room window thumbing through the book of tricks he’d left on the coffee table. She kissed me on the cheek. “He thrilled him, I won’t argue you on that, but try to keep it in perspective,” she said. “It’s infatuation. Nobody can develop real love for a man in a cape. Not even a boy.”

  Belsky’s house looked different finished, and in the light of day. Although I’ll admit I’d been curious, I had resisted the small temptation to drive by after Belsky told me they’d moved in. I suspected Liz herself had given in to the urge, but still she commented on how nice it looked as if she were seeing it for the first time. It was apparent now, in the way that it had not been to me in the dark, that this was one of the largest of the lots, more private from the neighbors and with a better vantage of the golf course and the lake on the ninth hole, and that the window above the door was taller than two stories—more like twenty-five feet.

  “We just go around back,” Elliot said.

  “We should at least ring the doorbell,” I said.

  But he had already started across the lawn. By the time we rounded the south wall behind him, he had stripped off his shirt and shoes and was moving through the crowd. A brawny man running to fat threw a football to a group of boys. A girl in a bikini pushed a baby on an old metal swing set. A dozen children bobbed up and down in the massive swimming pool. Elliot ran toward it. “Fish out of water!” he yelled, and grabbed his knees to his chest as he sailed out over its middle. Then another boy, whom I thought I recognized from the face book as Tim, jumped on his head and crushed him under the surface. They came up laughing. A girl pierced the surface and spat a stream of pool water in Elliot’s face. He filled his mouth to return fire, and only when she raised her hands—a-glint with silver rings—to defend herself, did I recognize her as Peggy. I was so stunned by the whole scene, I didn’t notice Joyce sidling up beside us.

  “Well, hello,” she said. She waved in the direction of the smoking barbecue. “Bob, they’re here!”

  He waved a spatula to disperse the smoke. “Hey! I thought you’d be hobnobbing with a senator or something.”

  “Congratulations,” Joyce said, and she kissed me on the cheek.

  He stuck a finger in the sauce and tasted it. “Needs more of the fancy mustard.”

  “We’re out of fancy,” Joyce said. “We only have yellow.”

  “What would your dad think?”

  “He wouldn’t think anything.”

  He turned to me. “Joyce’s dad is a kingpin.”

  “That makes him sound like mafia, Bob.” She looked at me. “He was a nylon manufacturer.”

  “The nylon mafia.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  He said, “This house was a twentieth-anniversary present, if you can believe it.”

  “How generous,” Liz said.

  “No kidding. He wasn’t even embarrassed when she married me.”

  “Stop it,” Joyce said. “He wasn’t embarrassed at all.”

  “He said, ‘At least you didn’t pick a deadbeat dad.’”

  “That is absolutely not what he said, Bob. He said, ‘You picked a good father for my grandchildren, Joyce. It took me fifty years to figure out that nylon wasn’t important. I’m glad he doesn’t care about striking it rich.’ Those were his exact words. He wishes he were more like you.” She tilted her chin up with pride.

  “Of course he does,” he said. “He can’t do this, for instance,” and he put his hand up under his T-shirt. He pumped his free arm and made a flatulent sound you could have heard from the street. From all points in the yard, this triggered a familiar braying laughter that could only have been his children. Two ran at him from either side and leaped at his back, and somehow he caught them both around the waist so that he held them like footballs. He started spinning in place, and his children bucked and laughed under his arms and screamed “Stop! Stop!” When he finally did, one of them threw up on his apron and started to cry.

  “Damn it, Joyce!” he said.

  “What did I do!?” She picked up the boy and stroked his hair.

  “Stevie threw up again!”

  “I see that!”

  “What are you letting him play and eat barbecue for, for Christ’s sake?”

  “He’s not sick, you spun him on a stomachful of hot dogs.”

  “He throws up holding perfectly still all the time.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. She pressed Stevie to her chest and strode toward the house. Robert took off his apron and held it up for me to see. “Jesus,” he said. He crossed the lawn and went in a sliding-glass door as she passed through French doors at the opposite end of the sprawling house. Although we were suddenly alone, for a moment neither Liz nor I said anything. Behind us there were splashing sounds from the pool; the slap of a caught football; shrieks of children—an unfamiliar two or three, and then our son’s. We kept our eyes on the doors Robert and Joyce had passed through. At some point Liz made herself say, “Wow,” and I responded with, “Yeah,” but it was not clear from this what exactly had surprised us, and although I suspect she had intended, as I did, to adopt a tone of superior amusement, the truth was that somehow, despite the fact that we had clearly just witnessed a domestic dispute, my predominant feeling was one of inadequacy.

  Robert returned first, wearing a white lace-trimmed apron and carrying a tall glass of scotch. He held it up to us, smiling, and took a sip. “Time to get some more of these babies on the fire,” he said, and he took the tinfoil off a platter of raw hamburger patties. As he set them on the grill, they sizzled fiercely.

  When Joyce came back, she was wearing a UC Davis sweatshirt and Stevie was wearin
g a pair of He-Man pajamas. She winked at us and stood next to her husband in a cloud of barbecue smoke. Stevie stared at me from behind his sucked thumb until I looked at the grass.

  Robert said, “I’m ignoring you.”

  Joyce grinned and said, “Good, I’m ignoring you too.”

  Stevie pointed at the grill and said, “That one’s not getting any fire, Daddy.”

  “Thanks, Chief.” He moved a patty toward the center. “How do you feel?”

  “Okay.”

  Now Joyce leaned to kiss Robert and noticed his apron. She reared back. “Well, don’t you look sweet!”

  “Mine had Steve’s puke on it.”

  “I have to get a picture.” She set Stevie down, and he ran off toward a sandpile, stopping midway across the lawn to put his hands on his hips in a muscular stance and admire the lay of his pajamas. Then he kept on running. Joyce took an Instamatic from the pocket of her sweatshirt and held it with her finger over the viewfinder in one hand and her drink in the other.

  “Curtsey for me,” she said.

  Robert held one corner of the apron out between pinched fingers and did a deep plié.

  “Wait,” she said, “I can’t see the frilly bottom.” She backed up a step and he curtsied again.

  “Wait, wait,” she said.

  “Christ, Joyce.”

  Then she backed up another step and fell into the swimming pool. The splash was huge. When the water cleared, we could see Joyce’s drink hand above the surface. Her head bobbed up and she drew the camera out of the water and set it on the side of the pool, laughing.

  Robert cupped his hands around his mouth like a megaphone. “’Least you saved your drink!”

  She set her drink on the poolside and hooked an elbow over the copingstones. Her thick sweatshirt was dark with water, and she could not stop laughing. Here and there on the lawn people clapped and shouted catcalls. Little children in pajamas jumped up and down at the sight. Elliot stood dripping on the side of the pool between Peggy and Tim, his face wide-eyed and smiling in unself-conscious delight such as I had not seen grace him in over a year. Liz stepped to my side and watched with me as Robert leaned over, his heavy waist peeking out from under his T-shirt, and took both of his wife’s hands. He hoisted her out, and somehow I knew before he did it that when he got her up on the patio, he would hug her soaking body against his own.

  EVERY YEAR, SACRAMENTO IS BESET BY RAINSTORMS. PARKING lots become reflecting pools, and people cross downtown streets in the center of blocks to avoid gutter puddles deep enough to flood their pant cuffs. Without an umbrella, a rush to a waiting car will soak one’s suit jacket through to the skin. The rivers overflow and eat away at their own banks, so that when people go to sell their properties years later, they’re surprised by the loss of acreage they have suffered.

  The last two weeks of the February of 1983 were particulary wet ones. Just a few days after the Belskys’ barbecue, the record heat broke with a heavy rain that woke me. It had flooded the windowsills and pooled along the baseboards, and I moved from room to room to swab it with towels as they slept. In the moonlight, the house held still for me, spellbound for my baffled, outsider’s eyes—the living room with the remnants of a game of Yahtzee between Liz and Elliot, my own bedroom where my wife lay smiling sadly through a dream, and up, up, up, above me, my attic where my son lay snoring, one long, strange, man’s calf exposed atop his sheets. I took the wet towels to the washing machine and sat down at the table in our dark kitchen. I poured myself a tall glass of milk. I ate three dried apricots and a Saltine. It had been three weeks, I told myself. The trap problem had not recurred, and I had seen no other signs of trouble in our pipes or vents. And one by one, I stole back to each room to close all of our windows.

  When I woke up the next morning, I was glad I had done so. It was still raining, and by lunch, three counties near San Francisco had flooded. Our papers covered the damage with vivid photographs—families paddling down their streets in canoes, and dogs standing on the roofs of their houses awaiting rescue—and by journalistic magic, these rekindled the dying embers of the story about my dam. It was illogical; no one had suggested heavy rain could cause my dam to fail. But the images of people displaced from their homes filled people with fear, and it doesn’t take much to fan such flames. A picture of water running along the spillway at North Fork (which, of course, is precisely what a spillway is designed for) appeared on the front page of the newspaper with a caption that read “Rainwater overflow at North Fork Dam, still under investigation for risk of failure.” A local radio-talk-show host parked himself by a guardrail one day and measured the depth of puddles along the right abutment. Two days later, a raving cautionary editorial titled “Noah’s Ark” spanned two pages at the end of the A section of the Sacramento Bee. By the end of the week, protesters had assembled on the capitol steps with rain slickers and canoe paddles to dramatize the imminent danger posed by my dam. That night, I brought home a sausage and mushroom pizza, but Liz had left a note on the kitchen counter. Elliot was spending the night at Tim’s, and she was taking Rita out after work to cheer her up, and my surprise that in the last two months she had become a confidante to a coworker whose name I didn’t even recognize somehow made eating the pizza alone in front of the protest coverage even more depressing.

  Many of the roofs in Sacramento are flat and prone to leaking, and the bulk of the real damage in our county that month could be blamed on this alone. My office building suffered some. A leak in the roof allowed rain to seep through the ceiling. It wasn’t a large leak, just a dripping in the hall, but it ultimately soaked a fire detector, shorting it out and deploying the sprinkler system on the northern half of the fourteenth floor.

  This forced a temporary move for me and six other engineers. Howard insisted on my having a corner office, and he found a vacant one for me on the southwest corner of the second floor. The eastern wing of that floor housed the cafeteria, and from the elevators, I could smell corned beef, French fries, sugar. In the hallway outside my office hung a photograph of the capitol building. The picture was so old that the paper had yellowed, and the skeletal remains of a spider were trapped behind the glass in one corner of the frame. The office itself was spacious but low-ceilinged, and the view lacked grandeur. Even the prospect of I-5 was obstructed by a telephone pole.

  Howard assured me it would take less than a month to perform the necessary repairs to Fourteenth East; so I didn’t give much attention to such things. The office didn’t have a filing cabinet, but I didn’t request one. When the thermostat worked poorly, instead of contacting Building Services, I brought an oscillating fan from home. And although Facilities had ignored my instructions and delivered my photographs to me there, I did not unpack and hang them. The boxes of files and frames against the wall gave the space a storage-closet look, but this didn’t really bother me. In fact, I didn’t give the state of the office much thought at all until one afternoon when I had been there almost two weeks Elliot appeared in my doorway.

  “It took me a long time to find you,” he said.

  “They didn’t change my location on the directory because the move is only temporary.” Suddenly I saw how my not having mentioned it to him might make it seem like cause for shame. I searched for a description that did not sound defensive. “They’re repairing some water damage upstairs.”

  He set his backpack on the floor. He looked for my guest chair, and it was under a stack of papers. On top of these was an editorial about the upcoming decision on modifications to my dam. The author was against modifications, but mostly because they were so expensive. We should accept the risk, he felt, even though he seemed to suggest the risk was huge. I stood to move it aside, but Elliot got to it before I did. He sat down, and the oscillating fan passed over him, making his shirt billow. I had been taking all my meetings in a seventh-floor conference room; I hadn’t noticed how awkwardly placed it was for company. His eyes slid sidewards to anticipate the next passage of the fan. “I was
headed to the library to meet Tim,” he said, pointing over his shoulder. “I thought I’d stop by and bring you a root beer.”

  “Thanks,” I said, a brief hope flaring inside me, but I quickly told myself it was unlikely that it was as social an impulse as this. I wondered if Belsky had told him about my new office—suggested he drop in and surprise me. I felt a sort of dreadful certainty that my son would use both the shock of his visit and the vague denigration of our surroundings to set me off balance in preparation for whatever he had come to say.

  He took two bottles from his backpack and set one sweating on my steel desktop. He twisted the cap from his own and took a pull. His eyes flitted around the office.