The Testing of Luther Albright Page 7

  Howard repeated himself.

  “Jesus!” He stood, setting his chair teetering on its legs. Howard glanced at his notes, as if Robert’s expletive might have been scripted there. His hand trembled, but this could just as easily have been caffeine or nicotine withdrawal as nervous tension. Ken coughed. David sipped his cocoa, and Howard let the plans roll shut on the table.

  Robert picked up his papers to prepare for an exit, but in the heat of his anger, he stormed into the kitchenette and slammed the door. We could see him clearly through a pane of glass, no more than three feet from David’s chair, pretending not to notice his own mistake. He turned the water on.

  “Personnel issues, anyone?” Howard said.

  Ken cleared his throat and began softly with the latest installment on a strange junior engineer who had been coming to work sometimes as late as two o’clock and did not seem to respond to any of his warnings. It was difficult to fire people inside the agency; Howard recommended Ken talk to the Personnel Director and find out exactly what kind of documentation was required for his file. We all stood and began gathering our things. Robert slammed a cupboard in the kitchenette, and we left him there, the short boar bristles on the back of his neck standing out as he leaned over the sink.

  I WON’T TRY TO CLAIM THAT ANY SYMPATHY FOR ROBERT KEPT MY thoughts from returning quickly to my family. I could see how the favor I’d been shown would be an irritation to him, but I had no respect for the self-indulgence involved in storming out of a meeting. Although I’d felt a pressure in my chest even before Howard had read the full list of reassignments—somehow I’d known mine would be better than Belsky’s—this empathy was quickly overwhelmed by irritation, and, I’ll admit it, a ghost’s trace of embarrassment. Somehow it shamed me to see another man giving way so easily to his own worst impulses.

  On my office wall were five pictures, framed by Liz one birthday, of the rivers I had helped dam. When I started a new project, I began by visiting the site. In some cases I might have let this task fall to someone else and spared myself the packed suitcase, the wait in the airport, and the oppressive quiet of a hotel room, but I liked walking the ground myself. Some of this was practical—there were things I could glean that reports and photographs might not tell me: the depth of weathered soil to rock; the steepness of the abutments—but there was also the pleasure. Before I left, I always took a picture from some point downstream of where the dam would be, picturing the accumulation of earth, the size and shape of the change I might make as I looked through the viewfinder and snapped the photo.

  It is in one of these that I am featured, blurry and incongruous, in the foreground. When I was asked to evaluate the North Fork dam site, I had decided on impulse to take my family with me, and on the shoulder of the road, Liz served sparkling cider out of Dixie cups. Elliot was six then, and he touched his cup to mine and congratulated me. He stood there a moment looking proud of the gesture, his blown hair dark against the pale gray sky. Then he set off ahead of me to climb the steep hill beside us. I left Liz—pregnant one last time—by the car and followed. Stiff shoots of sagebrush broke against our pant legs and released a spiced smell. His breaths were short and determined by my side. At the crest, he asked me for my camera. He positioned me above him, with the gap of the canyon I would seal off behind me, and took this picture. In it, I am smiling in surprise at his request, and my hair is lifting on the wind.

  I took a deep breath and moved to the window. My current office had a view of the I Street Bridge over the murky water of the Sacramento River, and although I’ll admit I looked forward to the stately view of the capitol dome, there was something here that soothed me. Cars drove slowly across the bridge, one east, and then one west. I could look straight down out my window, at the tops of the buildings below, little antennas and ducts and maintenance doors and patches of tar, all of it hidden from view as people walked through the clean white seat of our government, and somehow, no matter how anxious I was feeling, each time I did this my lungs would fill fully of their own accord, and I would turn back to my desk, momentarily relieved.

  I tried to get some work done, but every fifteen minutes or so, I picked up the phone to see if I could reach Liz. I wanted badly to tell her I wasn’t worried about Elliot, although in fact I was. Why did I want to do this? She was a strong woman, stronger than I was in almost every way, but when I looked at her, even her unusually muscular arms or the set of her jaw when she confronted an unscrupulous salesman (aloud!) about what he was trying to put over on us, somehow all I wanted to do was protect her. As I’ve said, she was the youngest of five sisters, the only one without a job and the last to have children, and while mostly her insecurities only made themselves plain in an excessive attention to my needs, in that last year before Elliot was born, they seemed to consume her. One memory that stands out is the night of a black-tie fund-raiser Trish and her husband were hosting for the Cancer Treatment Center at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. We hit bad traffic coming over from Sacramento, and all through the drive, Liz was sitting up very straight to keep her white taffeta dress from wrinkling, but shortly after we arrived, she disappeared into the kitchen to sit on a stool and play Candy Land with two nieces in velvet dresses. I tried to tell myself she was having a good time, until just before dinner, when her sister took the landing on the stairs beneath a crystal chandelier and toasted the bravery of the children they were supporting, and I saw Liz glance at her own reflection in a gilt mirror. Later I woke in the guest room alone, and I went downstairs to find her sitting on the bottom stair beneath that same mirror. She looked up at me, her cheeks shiny with tears. “It’s just hard being here,” she said. “I’m so glad for her, but it’s hard seeing what she has.”

  I think I did a reasonable job of hiding it for her sake, but the truth is the words stung me. The fact that I had not yet managed to get her sustainably pregnant was making me feel more than a little inadequate, and I had begun to fixate irrationally on the other things I could not give her. Across the street, for example, our new neighbor was building a mock Tudor house with a three-car garage, and this had moved me to repaint our house and dig a swimming pool in our yard. After her second miscarriage, although her Ford was only five years old, I had traded it in for a new station wagon that simulated movement toward a future with children. So when the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article about Bay Area philanthropy featuring a picture of Trish standing between her two daughters on the porch of their hilltop Victorian and I saw Liz pinning it to our refrigerator, I guess something boiled over inside me. I said, “Is it really so disappointing, what we have?”

  She looked genuinely confused. “What do you mean?”

  “No black-tie fund-raisers. No big house. No girls in velvet dresses.”

  “Oh, Luther,” she said. “I don’t envy Trish because her life is fancy. I envy her because she’s so important.”

  “Who cares about the society pages?”

  “That’s exactly my point.” She opened the refrigerator and took out a package of ground beef.

  I said, “You said she was important.”

  “Yes I did.” She took a frying pan from a drawer beneath the stove. “Because she’s a good mother and an activist, not because her name is in the paper.” She peeled back the plastic on the package of meat. I watched her shape it into three hamburger patties. Finally, she shook her head and turned. “I didn’t say she seemed important to other people, Luther. I said she actually is important.”

  It was a few hours before my ego receded enough for me to recognize the self-criticism at the heart of her envy, and although at the time I still felt too implicated by the general dissatisfaction it implied to feel any compassion, now whenever I looked back on this moment, my breath caught for her. Occasionally this came mixed with a selfless courage that almost moved me to ask her if she still felt that kind of jealousy, but more often it only made me feel a vague desire to give her something large, like an oven or a sapling, although at times li
ke this—at most times, truthfully—I was at a loss to imagine what she might need.

  My afternoon at the office passed with very little work. I did some filing I normally would have given Elena, because after a while the accumulation of minutes I passed picturing Liz emptying the trash can full of Elliot’s hair instead of finishing the memo I had to write was making me feel the beginnings of self-loathing. The filing was easier. I was bending over a drawer when Robert Belsky appeared in my doorway.

  “Hail to the Chief,” he said.

  “Come on in,” I managed.

  “Can I? The inner sanctum?”

  He looked up at the ceiling tiles, making a quick count. “Your new one’s not just the view corner, it’s bigger too.”

  “More space for you and the investigators to sit.”

  He smiled; I had won something with this. “We can set up the polygraph next to that big window,” he said.

  “Right.”

  He stepped into my office. When I first met him, he had told me he didn’t like my shoes. Never trust a man in Hush Puppies, he had said, laying his brain bare. Now he reached for my desk and picked up one of my family photographs: the three of us in front of our house in the late sixties, Elliot seated on my joined hands and gripping my arms like a boy on a swing. There is a quality to a child’s use of you when he is young: your lap a stepladder, a desk, a drum. Belsky’s thumb pressed on the glass would leave a mark.

  He said, “Come out with us tonight. Buy a round of drinks for the losers.”

  “I’d like to, but I can’t.”

  “We’re government employees. Take off half an hour early. Who are you kidding?”

  “Actually, I am leaving a little early, but I’ve got another commitment.”

  He grinned. “And with a wife like yours? You dog.”

  I tried to imagine what turns of life produced someone like him. It made me angry. Instead of expressing this, I said, “Maybe another time.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said, and he set the picture back on my desktop.

  As soon as he was gone, I stood and gathered my things, because now I had my lack of social courage to add to my list of distractions. It was almost four thirty. I might as well go. I got into my car, and although I had resolutely avoided thinking about it—there was a vague embarrassment in the predictability of what I would do—when I headed across the river toward Arden Fair Mall, the shame of this was muffled under the familiar excitement that made this kind of errand a habit. I tried to think about what recently had seemed to absorb her, what she had pursued with energy and confidence to the unarguable benefit of her husband and son, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot, I had already decided. Ken’s Cameras was on the east side, near the food court, and as the salesman showed me three different models, his showroom floor smelled less of photo paper and camera plastic than waffle cones. I pretended to listen to his pitch and then settled blindly on the one with the most features. It had a remote control and a screen that collapsed for storage in a metal tube, and I drove home listening to a traffic report to avoid examining my own behavior—the strange impulse to reassure my wife of her worth and purpose with the gift of a slide projector.

  When I pulled into the cul-de-sac, they were in the front yard, loading the first leaves of fall into a dark plastic bag. They looked up when I pulled into the cul-de-sac, like a pair of deer alert to the breaking of twigs, and immediately I was struck by the familiar feeling that they had been discussing me.

  As I got out of the car, Liz waved.

  “Aren’t you industrious,” I said, my heart racing.

  “It was Ellie’s idea. He came home and wanted to rake and bag.”

  I had been thinking about it all day, but still the stark expanse of his scalp made me feel the pulse in my neck. In the periphery of my vision, I could see a pink-brown worm writhing, exposed by their work. Damp elm leaves were around our feet. I could not look down, the energy between us was so electric. Liz was wearing a yellow-flowered sundress and my hooded sweatshirt and a pair of green rubber boots. For three or four seconds, she was able to hold my gaze, but finally her eyes slid toward him, and I wonder now if already she understood how thoroughly I would disappoint her.

  I said, “Is there something I can do to help with dinner, or should I take over here?”

  She handed me the bag. “I know what’s cooking. You two finish up.”

  The storm had pulled enough to fill two bags, but it was only the first week of November, the tree above us still dense with yellow leaves. We would do this work half-a-dozen times before the season was over. His head rose and fell in front of me, and the leaves made their papery sound. When he was only two years old, he had insisted, one day, on helping, and I saw how one of the pleasures of parenting is the simple lesson that humans are born with a yearning to be of use. He had taken the rake from me, the handle a wild and unwitting weapon in his hands, and I forced myself from warning or assistance. And then again, another pleasure: the surprise of his competence. Within four or five attempts he had the hang of it, gripping the handle low and dragging the leaves with the rake’s big scraping hand.

  I said, “We had our senior staff meeting today.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “You were right. Safety of Dams decided to ask us for an investigation.”

  He stooped again for another armful of leaves. “Is it going to be a hassle for you?”

  “No. They assigned it to Robert Belsky so I can keep working on the geothermal project.”

  He snorted and released an armful of leaves into the bag, waiting for me to ask him what was funny.

  Finally, I did.

  He said, “I just hope you like him.”

  “I like all of my coworkers.”

  “Yeah, but this guy’s looking for mistakes in your work.”

  He stooped for more leaves. He’d reached the end of the pile, and what remained was dark and sodden. I watched him draw the wet leaves against his sweatshirt.

  I said, “There’s a great deal of trust between good colleagues.”

  “I’m just saying it could be pretty tense.”

  “We’re all on the same team.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “We’re practically like family.”

  The bag was too full for this last armful, but he straightened and forced them in anyway, making a sloppy job of it. Then he looked at me. “Then how come I’ve never met any of them?”

  “What?”

  “If they’re like family, how come I’ve never met them?”

  “It never occurred to me that you’d like to.”

  “Well, I would.” He blinked at me. There was a dark circle on his sweatshirt where he had pressed the leaves to his chest. “That is, unless you wouldn’t want me showing up at your office.”

  “Of course I would.”

  “Sure—”

  “I’d be proud to introduce you around.”

  He snorted. “Take me out for a drink with your boss…”

  “Why not?” I said.

  When I was fourteen, my father began to test my mother’s patience just like this, abruptly and roughly, like a firefighter sounding a roof for weak zones. Elliot tied off the bag without answering my question and then stooped to tie his shoe, and the view of the pink crown of his head filled me with an uncomfortable mixture of anger and compassion. I closed my eyes.

  During dinner, he was quiet, but Liz enjoyed an ease with this she only exhibited in the wake of a frank conversation, and in imagining the uninhibited give-and-take about his haircut that had probably punctuated their half of the raking job, I was forced to acknowledge that his silence now was triggered solely by me. She steered us deftly through conversations about Michael Jackson’s new video and the Falkland Islands and a woman she had seen that day driving in a car filled with live geese. Elliot and I both ate more than we otherwise would, hiding behind the mechanics of chewing and swallowing, but in Liz the tension between us only brought out grace. She serve
d him a second potato and told a joke that made him laugh, and when she did so herself, I could tell that for a moment, in rising to the occasion of our father-son crisis, she had forgotten its burden. The laughter was genuine. She sat back in her chair; her eyelids fluttered; and in the pocket of ease this created, Elliot and I both set down our forks.

  In bed that night, she sat cross-legged on our bedspread, sorting nickels into paper sleeves. A textbook on gardening lay open beside her, and as her fingers combed through the loose change, she glanced at it. In twenty-two years with me, she had mastered a posture of easy, indifferent patience. I stepped in and shut the door.

  “Well,” I said—a complete sentence.

  She laughed, but for the first time that night there was something nervous in it.

  I laughed too and then said, “For the record, I’m not worried about it.”

  “Me neither,” she said.

  “He’s a happy boy, and the evidence, however weird, is still consistent with this.”

  “You’re right.”

  I said, “He seemed fine tonight.”

  She nodded, searching my face, and it is hard to remember if my pulse rose then due to excitement about my surprise or a sudden sense of shame about the sleight of hand it represented.

  “I have something for you,” I said.

  I had left it behind me in the hall, and I did not wait to check the look on her face before I turned. I opened the door and slid the boxes in and when I stood up to explain she was already blushing. “Oh, Luther,” she said. She wore an expression that used to pass across her face both when Elliot drew her a picture and when he skinned his knee: something like heartache. I wanted to reach out and pass my thumb over her brow, to relax the tension there, but instead I said: “That photo album you made from this summer is so fantastic. You’re the historian in this family; without you we’d lose all sense of ourselves.”

  I leaned over the box then and read the features, and somewhere in my monologue about the virtues of these, I slipped into bed and switched off our lamps and trailed off into the dark. An elm branch blew against the window, a soft tick and scrape. When our eyes adjusted, we would still be able to see little. The elm tree stood just outside the window, and its thick canopy obscured any moonlight. In one month, after the last leaf fall, it would be different, our ceiling a shadow theater of blown branches and passing clouds.