The Testing of Luther Albright Page 6

  “No thanks.” I thought he would leave it at that, but soon he tapped my arm where it lay between us on the armrest, forcing me to turn. His face glistened in a flicker of light from the screen.

  “What is it?” I asked. Perhaps it sounded sharp in the sudden quiet.

  “Nothing,” he said, after a time.

  In the car, he sat beside me, his eyelashes dark with dried tears. We drove along Sunrise Boulevard with its signs like beacons: Plexiglas hamburgers and neon car keys; a hot tub filled with turquoise spangles. He asked me how I had liked the movie, and I told him I had found it very moving, sort of heartwarming, really very stirring, hinting at the emotion I had felt without referring to his own. In my own adolescence, my father had waited long enough that my first few beard hairs grew half an inch, fine like baby’s hair. It was winter in New Jersey, and I felt the sparse mustache when I licked my lips to soothe their chap. I had thought of taking his razor or buying my own, but I knew he would notice that I had shaved, and in the last two years I had learned that his reactions were unpredictable. Instead I waited. In the end, he called attention to it at the dinner table in front of my mother in an exchange whose retelling would make him look worse than I’m willing to. But the memory of it troubled my plans. Now I could not imagine a conversation that would have made me comfortable.

  When we got home, Elliot went downstairs to reclaim himself with work on his lawn mower engine, and I went to my bedroom and took the photocopied sheet from my pocket. In my medicine cabinet, I had stored the two cans of shaving cream and the small packet of razors. Beside these was a spare aluminum-shafted model I sometimes took to the office to prepare for a late-afternoon meeting, and what I thought then was that this one would better communicate my respect for him. There was ceremony in the gift of such a razor. I crept into his bathroom.

  It was as the bathrooms in motels appear. His washcloth folded on the towel bar. His toothpaste and comb stored behind his mirror. I set the two canisters of shaving cream next to the sink and the razor beside these. I took the folded instructions from my pocket and laid them on the counter. The corners were turned up from the curve my hip had forced in the theater, and I smoothed them out against the tiles. I set the cans of shaving foam on opposite corners. I tried different arrangements and avoided my reflection in the mirror. In the end, I refolded the page and left it next to the razor, cupped in the shape it had taken in my pocket, and went back to my room.

  THE NEXT MORNING, LIZ GOT UP EARLY AND SHOWERED BEFORE us. I found her in the kitchen, wearing jeans and a fawn-colored sweater, and the bright red sneakers she wore in the evenings when we toured our neighborhood looking for weakness. As she peeled white from a section of orange, I almost told her what I had done. I was sure this would be his first morning to use it, and it seemed our shared anticipation might offer some small consolation for all I had withheld.

  “Today’s the day,” she said, and for a moment, it confused me. But it was my meeting she meant. “High corner office, for sure,” she said.

  Then we heard his footfall on the stairs.

  For many years I would tell myself that, at least in the most immediate sense, it didn’t matter; that telling her would not have prepared her for what happened anyway. Our son was fifteen years old, wore twill pants she bought at back-to-school sales each September, and had been on the honor roll every year since the third grade. He told long stories at dinner, holding his knife and fork suspended above the table, and would still fall asleep open-mouthed on a sofa beside us. Sometimes I came home from work to find him standing shoulder to shoulder with her as she sautéed a pan of onions in an intimate silence that she would describe to me with grateful wonder after we switched off our lamps for sleep. Although she was a mother, and over the years she had shared a thousand worries, it seemed to me that until what I drove him to that morning she had no real cause for concern about our son. The evidence must have seemed sudden. The night before he was complimenting her cooking and taking out the garbage unbidden, and twelve hours later he arrived at breakfast: clean socks, pressed shirt, pants and belt, and his scalp shaved to a waxy smoothness that gave off the scent of artificial pine.

  In case you’re assuming that baldness was a fashion then among children in California, I can assure you it was not. We lived in a suburb of Sacramento. Sacramento itself, like the capital cities of most states, is a small town, not cosmopolitan, where ticket lines and traffic flows at four-way stops are negotiated with the halting civility of legislature. The suburbs of such cities have the safe, unchanging magic of a village inside a snow globe. The children at his school, at their most radical, wore their sneaker soles down to the canvas and the fine welting on their corduroy pants to the sheen. Some boys persisted with the long hair that had been popular over the last decade, but by far the most common form of rebellious expression was the dirty T-shirt. His appearance could not have been more alien.

  “Good morning,” he said, slipping into his chair.

  Liz was at the stove, spoon poised to pull a soft-boiled egg from its water. When she turned, her lips were already parted, but her greeting died there, and map shapes of color bloomed at her neck. Elliot looked at me. He had nicked himself slightly, to the right of the crown. Although I was by any measure surprised, I immediately decided that to express this would be a grave error.

  “I like your new look,” I said.

  He had shaved his mustache too—it had taken me that long to notice this—and the bright pink of the tender skin there called strange attention to his mouth. Before I spoke, his lips had been slightly parted, and they remained so. He did not smile, or furrow his brow, or, as he often did when he was nervous, grasp his glasses delicately at the hinges and set them back on his ears. The egg water spurted and bubbled on the stove. He said, “You don’t think it’s too shiny?”

  “Not at all.”

  Liz recalled herself. “No, sweetie.”

  “It’s very sleek,” I said.

  “Yul Brynner,” said Liz.

  “Kojak.” This bit of television knowledge had come to me unbidden, and I was grateful for it.

  Liz’s spoon dripped water on the tile. In the weird, slow time of shock, it occurred to me that our eggs would be overcooked. Elliot ran a palm over the top of his head. Back and forth. Watching us. “Here,” he said finally. “Feel it.”

  And so I did. It was smooth and still cool from the moisture required to shave it bare. Liz crossed the kitchen and laid her hand next to mine emphatically, with a light slap, as if she feared too tentative a touch would betray her alarm. I thought about meeting her eye then, but I did not. I kept my own on the tiny, cold-shrunken pores of his scalp, and a vein there, snaking like a river through difficult terrain. The nick was to the left of this, and small. And there was a flat spot, just behind the crown, that a brief review of his early falls did not account for. I can mark the moment when Liz saw the flat spot with a hitch in her breath like the one that precedes tears of confusion. He looked so vulnerable. What I wanted to do was bend down and kiss him there, but of course I did not. Instead, I broke the silence we had let fall by removing my hand and remarking on how difficult it must have been to achieve such a perfectly close shave. Liz did the same, saying certain parts must have been like shaving a knee, only without being able to look. Or like buttoning a shirt in the dark. But more dangerous than that of course. The nervousness was rising in her, like a bubble, and she turned away from its object, toward the stove.

  We ate our eggs hard-boiled, each handling the untested mechanics of this differently but discreetly, I pressing mine between two pieces of toast, Liz stripping the shell over the sink and slicing hers into rounds before she came to the table, and Elliot peeling his over his plate, chips of shell falling like ceiling plaster onto his toast crusts. Inside my shirt, a single drop of perspiration ran down my side and struck my shirt where my belt cinched it close. Instead of his scalp, it was those bits of eggshell that drew my eye. I had built that house twenty-two y
ears before, and you could lift a roof shingle today and find the sheathing beneath dry as paper. Pipes never leaked, or knocked; my floorboards and hinges were silent, but still this misperception held: a snow of ceiling plaster on his breakfast leavings. He ate his egg from the fingertips on one hand, like a small piece of fruit. We turned newspaper pages. We offered to pass each other things across the table, and I left the house for my office as was my custom, at twenty minutes to eight.

  3 The Drink

  IT’S WORTH POINTING OUT THAT ALTHOUGH ROBERT BELSKY HAD been on my mind, at this point he still wasn’t very high on my list of preoccupations. Mostly I felt sorry for him, and irritated that he was, from time to time, able to make me feel awkward in front of my peers about something as trivial as not being free to accept a last-minute invitation. But never had he risen above the level of sideshow curiosity or puzzling case study in human nature. Liz and I had talked about him a few dozen times over the years as we brushed our teeth or fixed breakfast in the kitchen, more often than we talked about any of my other coworkers certainly, but not in the hushed tones and private places we reserved for topics like a bad homeroom teacher or a neighbor who, six years ago with a letter delivered by courier during dinner, had claimed that part of our swimming pool was in his yard.

  When I drove to the office that morning, then, my sense of foreboding was attached not to the meeting I was about to attend, but instead to the pure surprise of my son’s behavior. In my car on the Sunrise Boulevard Bridge, moving my foot from gas pedal to brake to keep time with the traffic, the music on the radio became so unsettling, I turned it down first to low and then to a murmur before turning it off altogether. In the river, what at first appeared to be a dog swimming for shore turned out to be a branch. Although I didn’t really need to, I stopped for gas so that I could try calling Liz from a pay phone. Elliot would most likely still be in the kitchen with her, but I might be able to gauge something about her state of mind from her tone. Answering machines were new then, and novel, and when after the sixth ring, her recorded voice came on the line, my chest filled with a mixture of relief and apprehension, and I began to interrupt. But even as I did so, I realized I was alone there on the phone, and that complex of feelings was replaced by embarrassment. I hung up and got back into my car.

  In the parking garage, I returned to the car twice—once to retrieve the envelope of papers I’d forgotten, and once to make sure I had remembered to lock the doors—and in the polished granite lobby, I had to remove my suit coat to check the beginning of a sweat. I stepped into the elevator behind my secretary, Elena. She was a pretty Puerto Rican woman who by some harsh chemical process had dyed her black hair an unnerving red. She did not look up from her paperback until we passed the fifth floor, and then she did so abruptly, as if she had detected me suddenly, by smell.

  “Up we go,” she said. She reached up and patted a button on her polka-dot blouse. She began every conversation by checking for some unknown humiliation: a missing button, a static-churned skirt front, a run in her hose. “Up, up. Up.”

  “Yes,” I said. We shifted our eyes to the lit numbers above our heads. Nine. Ten. Eleven.

  She smiled slightly. “The penthouse, maybe?” Word of today’s meeting had traveled among the secretaries, and it was the surprise of this small detail that recalled me. This meeting, I thought suddenly, was unlikely to go well.

  We had them once a month. The four most senior engineers in our division, our manager, Don, and Howard Krepps. Don asked us questions to give Howard an overview of our progress and to demonstrate to Howard that he was doing a good job. Other than this, it served mostly to heighten the competitive feeling among us. Some projects were very obviously more important and interesting than others, and as each of us was questioned about our work, the other three had lots of time to consider this inequity. The effects of this lingered in the air as we slogged through a list of administrative details. With new office allocations and the rumors about Don’s retirement, today’s was likely to be particularly tense.

  Lately we had been meeting in a windowless conference room down the hall from Howard’s office. It was small and dark, with a poster of chickens from when the floor had been occupied by the Department of Agriculture, but it had its own kitchenette where Howard could disappear for refills of coffee. The building had recently passed a new policy against smoking, and he was trying to quit altogether. Caffeine was one of the instruments of his new discipline.

  When I entered the cramped room, everyone but Don was already there. Howard clapped his hands together. “Okay, Luther, why don’t we start with you?”

  I glanced at the door.

  “Don couldn’t make it today,” he said.

  Robert fixed his eyes on me and winked; he had been the chief circulator of rumors about Don’s retirement.

  I sat down and took a file from my briefcase. “Okay. Fire away.”

  “Where are you on Bottlerock?”

  “Still working on the turbine pedestal design.”

  “What about South Geysers?”

  “About fifty thousand cubic yards of earth are already out, and Lacey said they haven’t seen anything so far that will indicate major changes on the plans for the well pads or the plant foundation.”

  In the seventies and eighties we were doing a lot with California’s plans for conversion to alternative energy. The geothermal power plants in Lake County were the highest profile of our projects, and when they’d been assigned to me, I’d felt a rush of excitement I’d tried to hide. This lasted about six months, and then what I found myself trying to suppress instead was a sense of foreboding. The Geysers Known Geothermal Resource Area is the largest geothermal field in the world. Among its hissing fumaroles and boiling springs, there are three hundred productive wells, but back when we arrived to start developing, PG&E and the municipal utilities had already acquired the best sites. The county balked some and required mitigation for wildlife habitat loss. Our plans were mildly contested during certification review—by Camp Beaverbrook, which objected to the impact of heavy construction equipment on the campers who walked along Bottlerock Road, and by an adjoining landowner whose case was argued on the basis that after many millions of dollars in design and construction, we wouldn’t have enough steam to run it anyway. Although it was relatively easy to overcome all of these hurdles, in the end, the landowner’s lawyers were right. We would operate Bottlerock for five years before admitting that although the steam field had been licensed at fifty-five megawatts, it was really only capable of producing fifteen, and we would abandon the steam wells at South Geysers before we even finished construction.

  But at the time of this meeting, it seemed that everyone but me was sure that I would be able to tap the source of unlimited power trapped hundreds of feet beneath the surface.

  Howard had more questions for me, during which he emptied his coffee and was too focused to rise for more. At one point, he encouraged the others to ask questions as well, but due to some combination of boredom and misplaced envy, no one took him up on this. Ken took out a file for his own presentation and reviewed it. David went to the kitchenette and returned with cocoa in a paper cup. Robert flipped through a long memo from the Personnel Office on changes in health benefits. It was forty minutes before we moved on.

  The discussion of everyone else’s work combined took less time than Howard had allotted to my project. Ken was working on some hydroelectric power plants, David on an early proposal for the expansion of the California Aqueduct, and Robert, because he had finished a big project just a few months ago, was left with reviewing shop drawings for a new visitor center. The contractor had prepared them, and it was Belsky’s job to count and verify, for example, that the number of pieces of reinforcing steel intended in our design were actually in the contract submittal. This alone was not enough to fill his time, and so he was also working on a cost estimate.

  “Robert, how are the drawings from Cooper?” Howard said.

  He sat back
in his chair. “Every bolt accounted for, sir.” He tried to smile.

  “Seriously. They’re good, but they’ve changed the specs before. There’s nothing missing?”

  “No, no. They did a fine job.”

  “How about the cost estimate?”

  “My son’s fifth-grade math class has it all figured out. If we have to remove three thousand cubic yards of soil, and each truck has a carrying capacity of ten…”

  All of us laughed, including Howard, but when we stopped, he said, “I’d like to see a copy of it when you’re done.” Then he closed his notebook. “Okay, just some administrative details left. Safety of Dams called to say they’ve been looking at North Fork since the earthquake—no surprise—and they’ve decided to go ahead and ask us to investigate for any deficiencies.”

  I picked up my pen to appear receptive, but my pulse quickened.

  “No, Luther,” he said, “you’ve got too much on your plate with Bottlerock and South Geysers. Bob, you do this one. You can go to Luther for backup materials if you need them.”

  “No better man to check up on Luther’s work,” Robert said, but he closed his eyes a second too long. Despite the false power it would allow him to feel over me, it was another bad assignment.

  After a discussion of budget issues, during which Ken’s eyes actually drifted shut, Howard unfurled a plan of the building on the laminate conference table. The coveted vantage in most office towers is south and west for the light and the sunsets, but in ours it was north and east for the view of the park and the capitol dome. We leaned in, doing our best to pretend we were only interested in gathering the information so we could dispense it to our teams. Howard pointed with a pencil and read off the office numbers without emotion, assigning Ken and David to center offices with views of the park. Robert and I were both assigned corners, but only mine had the view of the dome.

  “Come again?” Robert said.