The Testing of Luther Albright Read online

  I asked her to marry me after two months of dating and ten days later she had done so. At first she had sketched out a large Sacramento wedding, but one evening she knocked on the door to my apartment and told me she wanted to be married with me alone, in the house I was building near the river. I’m not sure which ardent therapeutic motive drove this—to shield me from social awkwardness, or let me live vicariously through her impulsive nature, or spare me the guest-list tabulation of what she had begun to suspect was my sheer, empty-handed lack of family and friends—but it was clear from the moment I arrived that she had done it for me. She stood alone with the minister, unflanked by guests or flowers, on the exposed earth in front of the frame of our house, and she had tethered helium balloons to the studs and window casings. When I stepped next to her, she brushed the hair from my forehead with an expression of joy I already recognized as the unambiguous, sure-footed pleasure she only seemed to feel when she had spared me some kind of pain. The day was breezy, and as we said our vows the taut skins of the balloons bobbed against each other with a solemn dun like struck drums.

  But even women who fall in love with their power to soothe a crippled man find after a time they have only so much patience.

  Now she followed my gaze up to our son’s window. “Penny for your thoughts, Inspector,” she said.

  “A penny? I wouldn’t dream of overcharging so steeply.”

  “It’d be a bargain, I’m guessing.” She glanced at the box of lightbulbs in my arms and raised her eyebrows, smiling. “Whatever it is, it’s fueled a week’s worth of obsessive maintenance work.”

  “We did find a crack in the foundation,” I said.

  “The earthquake, no doubt.” She looked at my mouth, my forehead, my hands. “I’m sure every house suffered some minor damage.”

  “Probably.”

  “More than ours.”

  “Maybe.”

  Above us, Elliot ran a hand through his hair at his desk. Crickets pulsed. From down the street came the sound of someone emptying trash into an outdoor can. Finally she said, “What is it, sweetie? What’s been bothering you?”

  “Robert Belsky asked me to go to Shipley’s with him,” I said, and my chest filled like a flight of birds. It was something that had been on my mind, something I doubtless would have shared anyway, but it was not what had been bothering me.

  Robert Belsky was a peer of mine at the Department of Water Resources, and Shipley’s was a topless bar in a bright pink building visible off Highway 50. A month ago, word had begun to spread that the Principal in our division would be retiring soon, and Robert and I were the only two engineers eligible for the promotion. Although we had both survived the cutbacks of the last decade, when there was not enough work to go around I was assigned the bigger projects. His strange way of equalizing the power between us in the face of this competition was to invite me out to a bar at times when he seemed to know I would refuse. He usually did this with other coworkers standing behind him in the hall, and when I took a rain check, he would joke that I was too good for him, or that I “didn’t like to mix with the hired hands.” It was an obvious manipulation, but it worked. Over time, the sheer number of refusals had filled me with a desire to accept.

  I said, “He stopped by my office and said something like, ‘So, you ever going to say yes?’ and when I said, ‘How about tonight?’ he said, ‘Great, I’m meeting a couple guys at Shipley’s in half an hour.’” Although what I should feel when someone manipulates me is anger, my first feeling is an annoying flare of desire not to shame them.

  I took Liz’s hand and led us silently across the lawn to the house, and briefly, opening my front door undercut the tension this conversation was stirring. The thick slab of oak is so perfectly balanced on its well-oiled hinges that despite its colossal moment of inertia I can push it closed by touching it with my pinky.

  In the warm glow of our front hall, I crouched to set the box of lightbulbs at our feet and then stood to face my wife. Her arms lay still at her sides; the muscles in her face relaxed. A look of patience and attention. Sometimes now I conjure her limb by limb. It gives me peace, but it’s not the same. Since her first miscarriage, she had toyed almost annually with the idea of becoming a volunteer counselor on a call-in line, and at times like this it always struck me that she would be extraordinarily good at it. Although these were precisely the moments when such an observation might have given her confidence, instead I found I could only bring myself to say it other times—counting out flatware for dinner or unlocking the car—when the compliment would not call for demonstration with a frank discussion of my fears.

  “So what did you say to him?” she asked.

  “I told him I’d pass. Then he said, ‘Mr. High and Mighty,’ but I didn’t take the bait.”

  “You didn’t say anything?”

  “No.”

  “What bothers you so much about him, do you think?”

  There were so many safe answers to this question—that he was rude, that he was talented but irresponsible, that he was difficult to work with—but already the familiar mix of tenderness and well-veiled impatience with which she was focused on my lie was making me feel guilty for distracting her from the truth.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  She closed her eyes—a kind of reflexive wince at this answer that she had developed over the years. This always bothered me some, but more troubling was the look she wore when she opened them: forgiveness and resolve, as if she’d decided one more time to wring satisfaction from helping me with the shallow fears I was willing to share. “He’s harmless, Luther. It’s mostly habit for him, that style, but he’s probably also trying to knock you off your guard a little. There’s that rumor about Don retiring, and didn’t you also say Howard’s assigning new offices next week?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “He thinks you’re about to get the nicer office and the promotion, and he’s probably right. He wants to punish you a little, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s also just curious. The two of you are so different.”

  There were two light thuds above us, Elliot kicking off his shoes and letting them fall from his bed to the carpet. I felt a prick of heat beneath my arms, and a coolness on my forehead that meant moisture there: beads I knew she could see. She put her hand out to me. It was a foot from mine, but she did not reach to bridge that distance. It was different—better somehow—to make me take hers. She pressed each of my knuckles with her thumb. I suppose this was another moment when I might have told her what was really troubling me. But seconds later there was a rumble of footsteps on the stairs behind us, and she looked past me with the uncomplicated smile that sometimes graced her face in rooms with our son.

  The following morning, I drove to a commercial plumbing-supply store where I had purchased all the pipe for my home. I told myself I was driving there to replace the empty jug of Drano, but I had no immediate need for more, and anyway Drano was something I could have bought at any grocery store. What I really wanted to do was talk to Larry Briggs. He was soft-spoken and knowledgeable, and even when five years had passed between my visits, he called me by name and offered me the contractor’s discount. As he rang me up, I could say something about Elliot’s reckless ways and my flare of temper, and Larry would laugh: because he’d worked with a blowtorch, because he had his own sons, and because my mistakes with Elliot could not hurt him.

  I might have recognized this agenda in the sharp pang I felt when I entered his store, but I did not. I like to think that this was not because I was incapable of the kind of self-examination that might have spared me my losses, but because I was so surprised that Larry wasn’t there.

  In his place was a woman in a white tank top watching a small TV and eating a bear claw. She did not look up at me when I entered, and while I walked the aisles she answered the TV’s false surges of laughter with her own. Only when I set the jug of Drano on the counter did she finally turn. She glanced at the jug and started to punch the regis
ter keys.

  “I have an account,” I said.

  She looked up at me. Although later I would learn she was only my age, she looked older. Her blonde hair was dry and her skin wrinkled from the sun. “What’s the name of your outfit?”

  “I’m not in the business, but the owner gives me the discount because I bought all the pipe for my house here.”

  “I do, do I?” She was the kind of woman least noticed: neither beautiful nor ugly.

  “You’re the owner?”

  “Afraid so.” She was grinning.

  “What happened to Larry?”

  “He had a heart attack last year. I’m his wife.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I was home with our kids, and I can tell you this is a big step up.”

  Some measure of my shock and discomfort must have shown on my face.

  “Joke,” she said. “That was a joke.” She turned back to the register. “Anyway, I’ll give you the discount on principle. Do-it-yourselfers are great repeat business.” She punched the keys. On her television, an angry woman was sending her husband downstairs with a pillow and blanket to sleep on the living room sofa. This caught her eye. “Doghouse,” she said.

  I handed her a five-dollar bill.

  “Have you tried a plunger yet?” she said.

  “Actually, I don’t have a clog.”

  “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  There was a small purple stain on the front of her tank top. It looked like grape juice. Something about her was infuriating. I might simply have ignored her baiting, but she was staring at me, holding on to my money, not opening the register waiting for me to respond.

  I said, “I’m just stocking up.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “I don’t need any tips on how to clear a backup.”

  “Right.”

  “I designed and built my plumbing system myself.”

  She winked. “My point exactly.”

  I have come across so many people like this in my life that sometimes I am ashamed I have not numbed myself to the way they court confrontation. Maybe it is because my father was the first of them that they strip me of self-control.

  I said, “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Whoa!” She laughed and raised her hands in the air. “You’re the boss.”

  She opened the register drawer, and I made a business of looking in my wallet: a sheaf of bills, some credit cards and a picture of the three of us at the Grand Canyon. I had taken it a few months ago. I had stood them at the observation wall and set the timer for thirty seconds, and captured a look on their faces that made me feel a lucky pressure in my chest, like the downward weight of hands. I am not proud of what I did next, but suddenly I had the impulse to take the photo out of its sleeve and hand it to her, not because I wanted her to know me, but because I wanted to show her what she didn’t have.

  It didn’t have the effect I was expecting.

  “Your family?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She studied it a moment, smirking, and handed it back to me between two fingers, so that I had to reach for it. Then she took some change from the register drawer and extended a closed fist across the counter. Her knuckles were chapped, and she was still wearing a wedding band. She would hold her hand there forever, I thought, to force mine beneath it. Finally I extended my open palm and she dropped my change into it—a single penny I would have left without had I known this was all that held me hostage. She laughed. “See you soon,” she said. Then she turned back toward her TV.

  IT WAS ABSURD TO PUT OFF SUCH A TRIVIAL PATERNAL DUTY; I knew this. The following night after dinner, I went into the kitchen and offered to dry.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He took a serving dish from the sink and handed it to me. Thus far the physical changes he was going through had passed largely undiscussed. Six months ago, he had hefted a set of dumbbells into Liz’s shopping cart at Kmart, and since then each morning I had listened to his fierce breaths between lifts through the vent in the wall of my closet as I dressed. Now in his back pocket, I noticed the small notepad he had been using when he questioned me for his biography on my father. In these conversations, the deepening pitch of his speech was undermined by breaks into his old register at the ends of questions, and his hands, particularly at moments when he lost control of his own voice, trembled slightly, the way children’s never do. Water streamed out of the tap into the sink below, and he scoured the bottom of the saucepan with a square of green plastic wool. He never complained of chores, never complained, really, of anything, and although in the past this had filled me with a sense of accomplishment, more recently it had made me afraid. He inhaled sharply through his nose, as if to clear it, and I started where I stood.

  “Jeez,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  He dumped the water from the pan into the sink, and it splashed both of us. I did not flinch, but this time instead it was stillness that seemed awkward. I groped for the resolve I had felt before I entered the room. I was careful not to look at his face so that scrutiny wouldn’t lace my mention of his new mustache with a sense of invasion. I would like to say that when he finally broke the silence I myself had been seconds from speaking, but the truth was it had taken me less than five minutes to let go of my intentions completely. I was refining a plan to cut myself shaving the next morning, appearing at breakfast with a conversational dot of Kleenex glued to my chin by blood when he shut the water off and drew his notepad and pencil from his pocket.

  “Quick: what’s the one adjective you would use to describe him?”

  “Meticulous.”

  He wrote this down.

  “And what would your mom have said?”

  “Perfect.”

  And briefly the strain of answering newspaper questions about my father excused me from my resolution to talk to him about shaving.

  In the beginning at least, it was not so hard to stick to my plan; the early stories about my father were so free of omen. I told him that my parents had met at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1938. My father was a plumber from Hoboken with a high school equivalency and a lone magazine photo of the Hoover Dam taped to the wall of his basement apartment, but he was a smart man with exacting standards, and it had occurred to him that this might be an excellent place to meet a woman. This is the way my mother always told the story. On Saturday afternoons when his friends were running combs through their hair in preparation for a night out in bars, my father was riding the Hudson Tubes into the city. He slipped the recommended donation into the admission box and picked a different exhibit each time. He had been doing this for six months when he saw my mother in the costume gallery in the basement. She was the first woman he had bothered to speak to. He liked the way she held a finger up to the descriptive copy on the tiny plaque beside each display. That, and she was wearing a bright red dress that was a little bit shiny—she was killing time before a party. He came up to her and told her the casework had been installed poorly. If it were level, a tube of lipstick set on top wouldn’t roll its length, and he waited for her to take hers from her purse to let him prove it. He was like a peacock, arraying his feathers. Or the frogs that puff up their throats to make an impression. When her lipstick dropped off the end, he caught it in his calloused palm. She was an hour late to her party.

  All through my early boyhood, I was daily witness to a love between them that I took for granted. On the living room sofa after dinner, my mother might read a book of poetry while my father filed the metal burr from an imperfectly molded washer he had bought at the hardware store, not because it was necessary to the function of the washer, but because it bothered him in a way I grew to understand was both aesthetic and moral. The combination of ire and resourcefulness it ignited in him was the object of my mother’s passion. She left broken things out on the countertop—a kettle, a wristwatch, a jacket zipper—just to watch him take out his pocketkni
fe and curse the manufacturers. She did not begrudge him swear words, even in front of me. He was a man of fire and impulse and she a woman of introspection and restraint, and I would learn that she loved him for the long reach—for better or for worse—of his frankness and passions.

  Elliot took careful notes, and I talked continuously to discourage questions about the years I did not want to discuss. I kept shifting the focus to things like what he’d owned or the map names of places he had traveled, and just when Elliot appeared poised to interject, I wandered off toward the living room to find a book called America at War. “Historical context is essential to good reporting,” I said, and out of an impulse I imagine must have been born more of weariness than interest, he thanked me and took it up to his bedroom for the night.

  But the following morning, he had a second wind.

  “What did you admire most about him?” he said.

  We were tucked in a booth at the International House of Pancakes. Liz was wiping down the syrup carafes with a paper napkin she had dipped in her tea. Elliot’s notepad was covered in words I could not read. With the advent of puberty, his handwriting had grown scratchy, indecipherable.

  I sipped my coffee. “His exacting standards,” I said.

  “Like on construction?” We had talked about this already.

  “Yes.”

  “Something else.”

  “His resourcefulness then.”

  Liz said, “What about that time he took apart the door at Macy’s?”

  At Macy’s in New York one winter, my mother left us to go to the ladies’ room in the basement, and when she returned, she asked us to follow her back down to look at toasters. This alone should have aroused my curiosity. That fall my aunt had given her an electric mixer, and she had turned it on and then off just once before setting it at the back of a cupboard. But at six, I lacked this kind of suspicion. “I was thinking I might invest in one of these,” she said, and I leaned in to help with her decision. She pressed a chrome lever down. Beyond a pyramid of stock pots was a group of customers standing inside a small glass-walled room full of crystal. One of them rapped on the door. A manager in a suit and tie rushed over and put his mouth close to the crack so he would not have to yell. “The repairman will be here any moment,” he said, and when he left them to return to the telephone, my father shook his head and crossed the floor between the appliances. The plate-glass door was stuck shut, its hydraulic closing mechanism broken. In under five minutes he had removed the four screws that held the bracket to the door and pulled it aside. He moved us toward the Thirty-Fourth Street exit quickly, his hands at the smalls of our backs, and over my shoulder I caught sight of the manager scanning the floor in confusion. On the sidewalk my mother applauded. My father crossed his hairy arms. He was often in shirtsleeves, even in winter. It was not until I heard my mother retell the story for the third time that I realized she had lured us down there just to watch him rescue a group of strangers with his pocketknife.