The Testing of Luther Albright Page 3

  “It’s me,” he said.

  In the background, boys were yelling. Car doors slamming. Three fifteen: he was just getting out of school. There was a familiar rustle that meant he was holding the receiver against his T-shirt, talking to a friend. I looked out my window. On the street below, a fat man in a suit dropped his keys and stared at them where they glinted. Elliot took the receiver away from his shirt; child noise replaced the static. “So there’s this great-sounding party tonight.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Lots of guys from school are going, and Antonio’s mom can bring me home. Can I go?”

  “Of course,” I said, and braced myself.

  He said, “Why not?”

  He had grown skilled at this. There was a sharp note of irritation in his voice that I never heard from him except over the phone, when he pretended I would not give him what he wanted. Behind him, I could hear a boy’s voice say, “Told you.” Another said, “Man,” an expletive among them for complaint. I’d found through experimentation that at this point it was best to remain quiet. I used to worry that he just hadn’t heard me correctly, but reiterating my consent sometimes confused him and made his act difficult. Once I’d tried speaking nonsense to him between his complaints, a private joke between us: “Mercury vapor,” I had said. “Rings of Saturn.” But the pause this engendered made me think I had upset his rhythm, and I didn’t want to risk embarrassing him in front of his friends. And the few times I had considered participating in his act, making up reasons why he could not go, I began to sweat. In the end, my silence seemed to work best for both of us.

  Now he let it last, allowing time for a tirade of parental insensitivity. Then this: “You never let me do anything!” and the clatter of the phone in its cradle.

  For over a year, Liz had assured me that this refusal of invitations to parties was born of a misconception about the after-school world of his peers that he would soon correct on his own. It was out of the sight of adults, she said, in fast-food parking lots and converted basements, that children forged their adult identities, and they did this by testing out views and postures more extreme than those they felt. Elliot would start going to parties when he figured out his friends were just exaggerating the secret feelings he was wrestling with himself. Until then, adults would seem safer. He would seek the stability of a world he felt he could predict and understand.

  It assuaged my fears—both the plausibility of her explanation and the sound of her voice when she made it—but tonight for the first time I suspected him of an ulterior motive as well. When I got home, he was already there, sitting on the kitchen counter. Every Friday night, Liz experimented with a new cuisine, and that week she had asked Elliot to choose. The kitchen smelled sharply of fresh pineapple. She had cut one down the center, spilling its juice. Don Ho was playing on the stereo, and she had tucked a blossom behind one ear. As I came through the door, she was laughing, and immediately I was struck by the strange thought that he had been making jokes at my expense. In all honesty, in almost every case entering a room and catching a glimpse of the intimacy between my wife and son in their shared laughter or silence made me feel a large-hearted satisfaction, but from time to time I feared without proof that what drew them together was commiseration about me.

  “Tell him, Luther,” Liz said. “Men hula in Hawaii. They do warrior dances, a high-stepping kind of thing. It’s not only for girls.”

  Elliot grinned. Now that I had noticed it, I could detect his mustache in any light.

  She said, “Big musclemen with swords. Sometimes they do it with fire sticks. Really, it can be very tough.”

  He turned to me, and in a show of ignoring her, slipped for the last time into one of our old routines, one he’d picked up proudly years ago from listening to banter between me and Liz. “How was work?” he said.

  “Excellent.”

  “Move any mountains?”

  “Just some rivers,” I said, but we both looked at the floor. In fourth grade he had learned that the California Aqueduct was visible from space, and for the first time my job had appeared heroic. A small part of me had panicked every time I fueled this fire, but then I thought it’s not so bad for a boy to lionize his father.

  “Hey,” Liz said to him. “Hey, you.” Her hair fell over her shoulders, the iridescent blonde that lines the inside of some seashells. She enjoyed his show of neglect for the adolescent affection it was, but as he drew it out, spots of red appeared above her collarbone. His love meant too much to both of us. “What about my dance?”

  Elliot slid off the counter and put his hands together, tracing waves to one side and then the other, shaking his hips. Her hand dropped from her chest to her waist. Don Ho started a new song, “Ain’t No Big Thing,” and Elliot shook faster. Liz laughed out loud, her short laugh of surprise, all air, eyes wide. Elliot high-stepped over to her and took her free hand, and when he bumped his hip to hers, she beamed and set down her knife.

  During dinner, he told us stories: a split lip on the soccer field; a teacher who had conducted class in whispers to avoid waking a sleeping student. For a moment, they lulled me, but when Liz got up to go to the bathroom, he took his notepad and pencil from his back pocket and laid them next to his water glass.

  “What’s the most surprising thing your dad ever did?” he said. Then he took a bite of his pork.

  “Let me think about that,” I said, and I leaned away from the table into the rungs of the ladder-back chair to make it clear that this was what I was doing. Yesterday, we had spent an hour going over those facts that would form the bedrock of his report: date of birth, siblings, occupation. Now he was moving into what Mrs. Parks called Theme Development, the distinguishing feature of quality biographical research. He had explained that it was a long project, divided into three six-week segments: research, rough draft, and revision. I understood immediately that he would be interviewing me aggressively until Thanksgiving and peppering me with clarifying questions until well after the New Year, and lying in bed later I had settled on a strategy: I would tell no lies, but would rely heavily on omission.

  I should pause here and say that I wasn’t so blunt-witted that I was incapable of connecting the dots. I knew there was more to his choice of subjects than an interest in pleasing his teacher. The problem was that to reveal why I always avoided talking about my father—to share the ways in which he failed my mother and me, the neat and inevitable unfolding of events from the tiny wellspring of his flaws—would be to repeat his mistake myself. In other words, to do so would be to infect my family with my old wounds and sorrows, and, unlike my father, I’m a man who chooses not to burden those he loves. Some might argue that if honest anger is what a loved one seeks, then it can only do more harm to withhold it, but I can say from hard witness that airing one’s baser feelings is a very slippery slope.

  So now I was stalling. Elliot watched me and chewed. Liz had glazed the pork with pineapple, but she and Elliot had danced three songs before the high from his flirtation faded and she remembered to check the oven. By the time she returned from the bathroom, he was still working over the same bite.

  She said, “The powder room sink isn’t draining.”

  “Really?”

  “Well it is, but slowly,” she said.

  Across the table, I could see Elliot finally swallow. I raised my eyebrows at him. “I guess our services are needed,” I said.

  He and I had removed tangles of Liz’s hair from the trap beneath my bathroom sink half-a-dozen times, and at this point he could do most of the work without me. Without having to be asked, he wrapped the jaws of the wrench with electrical tape to keep from scratching the copper pipe. When he backed the slip nut up the drain and swung the trap free, I shined the flashlight down it, and, as I suspected, there was nothing but water.

  “Weird,” he said.

  “Not really,” I said. In a sink used only for washing hands, a backup was more likely to be caused by something deeper, and I said so. But as he rea
ttached the trap, I saw him roll his eyes. I had designed and built the house myself, included him in years of improvements that were integrated seamlessly into systems that had never failed in any way, and still this show of skepticism. He emptied the bottle of Drano into the basin and then leaned against the windowsill to wait. Liz appeared to fill our silence with a story about a friend of hers whose newly declawed cat had disappeared and barely survived a seven-day odyssey in the dog-filled wilds of their suburban neighborhood, and Elliot watched the basin full of chemicals as she spoke, his little mustache catching light from the frosted glass fixture above the mirror, until finally the mouth of the drain released two silver burps of air and swallowed the reservoir of Drano.

  After dinner, I went outside to replace the spent bulbs that lit the leaves and tree trunks at the outer boundaries of our yard. I could see Elliot through the windows of my house, first at the kitchen sink rinsing dishes, and next huddled at the small desk in his bedroom over notes about my father. I watched him for a while, holding his head in his hands in a posture of sorrow or concentration, and suddenly my wife was beside me in the grass. My pulse leapt, not, I’m ashamed to say, out of love or even animal surprise, but out of a sense that she’d come for something I was afraid to give her.

  I’d designed our house before I met Liz. It was a common floor plan, with a bedroom I referred to on blueprints as “Child’s,” but this was an act of optimism almost no deeper than the purchase of a lottery ticket. I hadn’t dated at all in high school, and my experiences with women in college had been unsatisfying. I’d been looking for something specific, but as so often happens, I was wrong about what I wanted. In my first semester, I sat down at the desk in my cinderblock dorm room and drew a matrix. Along one axis, I listed those attributes I felt would make a good girlfriend for me (quiet; patient; not too pretty), and along the other, the names of women I could not take my eyes from: a thin, freckled woman who wore a beret and an apron at the deli where I bought my sandwiches; a woman in my calculus class who picked at the chapped skin on her lips in a way that left them a deep, unlipsticked red. In almost every case, there was no intersection. I tore a fresh sheet of notebook paper, but, staring down at its whiteness, I was distressed to discover that I could not really think of anything these women held in common.

  Nevertheless, I invited a long succession of them to my room. I had a routine. Before I left the dorm for a party, I took some clothes from the lidded hamper in my closet and scattered them around the room. Then I set a portable fan on my desk chair so that the only place to sit was the bed. This always worked perfectly. I poured us red wine from a jug into Dixie cups and initiated a discussion about the quiz show scandal or the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Although people spoke passionately about these topics in the halls and cafeterias, I myself did not have very strong feelings, but once I discerned my date’s, I would join in enough to get her talking. Then at a certain point, I’m sorry to say more out of boredom and grim purpose than affection or longing, I would pluck a few items of stray clothing from the surface of the mattress and say, “What do you know, there’s a bed under here!” Almost invariably, she would giggle at this, and I could place my hand at the small of her back and lower her down on the bed among my musty laundry.

  I didn’t understand any better what I wanted after these episodes, and, more uncomfortable still, I didn’t like myself much. In the spring of my junior year, I woke up next to a woman with a bandage over one eye whose name I couldn’t even remember and lay awake next to her for an hour with an overfull bladder, smelling her sour breath, as a sort of penance. When I moved to Sacramento after graduation, I hadn’t invited a woman to my room in almost six months. I rented a small apartment on Marconi Avenue, went to banks in a tie, bought a piece of land, and began building a house. I did not think of my father in any direct way when I did this, but it is easy to see now that the way in which I researched the neighborhoods—through process of elimination picking the suburb and then the cul-de-sac and the plot and the design that would allow me to build an unimpeachable home for a hypothetical family I did not even really expect to have—stemmed from a desire to conjure a different possible ending to a family story into being. Every day after work, I changed into coveralls, and on weekends I spent whole days at the site with a cooler full of sandwiches I had fixed in my kitchenette at the Sunny Pines Apartments. I had no free time to date, and, to my surprise, standing next to pretty mothers at the grocery store, only the weakest flares of desire. It’s probably silly, I doubt this is actually the case, but I have sometimes had the thought that I might have spent my life alone had it not been for a strobe of red lights on my ceiling one night in my apartment. I drew back the thin curtain and saw a police cruiser idling in the parking lot. A burglary had taken place in the room next to mine. The next morning I took my valuables from a duffel bag in my closet and drove to the Wells Fargo Bank downtown to open a safe-deposit box, and it was Liz who issued me a key and led me into the vault. She wore low-cut blouses, and although I’ll admit I deposited items more frequently because of this, the truth is her conspicuous beauty made me nervous, and it was she who finally had to suggest I take her out to dinner.

  I didn’t really expect anything to come of this. When I returned to my apartment that morning, I examined myself in the mirror. I am not an ugly man, but neither am I particularly attractive, and so I fall in with the majority of people whose fairly neutral looks become defined largely by the personality that filters through them. By then, I had been in Sacramento three months without talking to anyone but my coworkers, and in the evenings alone in my apartment I would spread a towel on my bed and eat a cold dinner in front of the TV. In my visits to the bank to deposit coins, I was sure I had revealed myself to be nothing more than lonely and strange, and Liz—well, she appeared to be something else altogether. She wore short skirts and shiny blouses and teased the men who stood in her line by slyly questioning their motives for opening accounts. With an alchemy of calculated looks and behavior I have only seen her use a handful of times since, she could draw all attention in that vast open lobby—men, women, children—even when she was doing nothing more remarkable than picking slowly through her big ring of keys.

  But she surprised me. For that first date, I had taken her to the Coral Reef. She used a maraschino cherry to stir her rum and Coke, holding it by the stem. “Tell me about your family,” she had said, a date question. “Well,” I said. Three other couples sat around the hibachi table, obscured by steam. The chef’s knives were flashing. Little pieces of shrimp and steak flipped from the blades and sizzled fiercely. It was a sound I would have to speak over. This too was inhibition. I looked at her. She was wearing a necklace with a cluster of amber stones that were probably plastic, but it was beautiful. I kept my eyes there. I said it again, “Well,” and her cool palm covered my mouth completely. When I met her eye, she smiled and waited for me to absorb the strange comfort of this. Two seconds; maybe three. “Tell me about your job,” she said finally. And then she let her hand fall.

  Within three dates, I had told her about the time as a boy I had watched a dog die without trying to help or kill it, an act that had filled me with so much horror, I had crept into the Episcopal church on a weekday and left with a leaflet on Guilt in my knapsack. Then other things: a lingering look at my aunt stepping out of the shower; the comics I stole from a grocer who gave me pieces of gum for free whenever I stopped by his store. In each case she listened with a bright intensity to disclosures at the periphery of my deepest fears, and although at first her interest in such a plainly uncomfortable man was a bafflement, one night it dawned on me that it was these uneasy confessions themselves that were drawing her to me.

  At the time, I could not explain the certainty I felt about this—it was intuition—but after joining her for a family dinner, I felt I understood. Liz was one of five sisters, the youngest by six years and, it turned out, the most attractive by an unnatural margin. She met me at the door to her oldest siste
r’s house wearing a matronly gray dress and lipstick so pale it almost matched her skin, and led me to the living room where plain, dark-haired women and their husbands and half-a-dozen small children were packed in a confusing jumble. She introduced me to each of them with a small bit of description, Charlotte, “the doctor,” Eleanor, “the schoolteacher,” Pam, “mother of four out of six of the children in the room,” and Trish, whose engagement was the occasion we were celebrating. After an awkward flurry of handshaking, one of the husbands said, “We were just talking about the situation in Cuba, Luther. I polled everybody on what they think Kennedy should do. What’s your vote?”

  When all of them looked at me for an answer, I turned to Liz and said, “Interesting. What did you recommend?”

  Liz blushed, and an awkward silence came over the room.

  “That’s a good question,” Charlotte’s husband said. Oddly, instead of addressing Liz, he turned to Pam. “What did Lizzie say?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said, frowning.

  “We skipped her,” Eleanor said. “Trish was bending her ear about bridesmaids’ dresses.”

  “She’s the fashion expert,” Pam said kindly.

  “Not the foreign-policy expert,” Eleanor added wryly.

  “She’s always had the best eye,” Charlotte offered.

  “Yeah, that,” said Eleanor, holding up her wineglass and winking, “and Trish wants to get her buy-in early on a frumpy tent so she doesn’t steal the show.”

  Everyone laughed, including Liz, but by the end of the evening—an evening in which we talked about health care and public education and finished the debate about the Cuban Missile Crisis—it was not so difficult to imagine how she might have grown up believing her looks were her only power. In the end, I sometimes wonder if I owe my good fortune to nothing more than this: I was the first person who responded as attentively to her character as to her beauty.