The Testing of Luther Albright Read online

  She said, “Adolescence is a tough time, Luther. He sees himself change; he might be worried we won’t accept him. It’s probably just a test.”

  “Exactly,” I said. Although ordinarily this assurance from her would have relieved me, the abruptness of her return to the subject carried the somehow threatening insight that my gift had not been a digression. That my keyed-up talk of its features had been making my feelings plain all along. Downstairs the dishwasher churned.

  “He’s growing up,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Getting ready to leave the nest.”

  “Right.”

  She said, “In two years, he probably won’t even live here. We’ll be all alone.”

  I thought about this. I had that feeling I sometimes had that she was suddenly speaking in code, leading me gently somewhere I did not want to go.

  She said, “What will we talk about all day?”

  “What?”

  “When he’s gone.” When I didn’t respond, she laughed falsely, to maintain her momentum. “Most people would say something like, ‘Our aches and pains.’”

  “Really?”

  “Or ‘Our golf game.’”

  “But I hate golfing.”

  She said, “Or, ‘Honey, we don’t talk all that much now.’”

  “Well, that’s ridiculous.”

  The dishwasher stopped—the strange, long pause before it drained.

  She said, “That’s what Eleanor said that one time.”

  “What?”

  “That thing after her divorce. You remember.”

  The talc smell of her lotion came to me, and made me think of her body. I tried to recall. After each phone call, Liz tried to neutralize the subtle poison of her sisters’ comments with exaggerated impersonations I knew she loved them too much to mean: a bossy voice, a dullard’s drone, the piping of a little girl.

  “I don’t think I remember.”

  “You know.”

  She rubbed her feet together, a whispery sound. I wanted to reach under her T-shirt and lay a hand on her stomach, but I knew she would see this for the advance that it clearly would be and take it as a sign that I was not listening, instead of a sure sign that I was.

  Her voice grew infinitesimally softer. “She said she had always thought she and Jim were talking but they really weren’t. Not about the things that mattered. She said I might think we’re happy, but…”

  “But what?”

  I turned my face towards her to read her face but it was too dark to see anything clearly. Not even her lips when she finally made herself say it aloud: “…but maybe I just don’t know that I don’t really know you.”

  THAT WEEK I SAW THE FIRST OUTWARD SIGNS THAT MY EVASION was taking its toll. On Saturday afternoon, she came down to the laundry room wearing a yellow satin blouse over a short black skirt I had not seen in years, and when she descended half an hour later to defrost a casserole for Elliot, she was wearing a strapless velvet dress. Before we left, she had changed earrings twice, finally settling on no earrings but a long pendant necklace that drew attention to the dark well between her breasts.

  The occasion was a sixtieth birthday party for Don Moraine in the bar at the Capitol Hotel. Earthquake scaffolding still hid the old brick façade, but somehow it retained its grandeur. Management had strung the steel poles with lights and rolled a red carpet down the plank ramp that covered the damaged stairs. Liz had finally settled on a green silk dress with a matching jacket that hid the surprise of bare shoulders, and she moved around the room to each of my colleagues, laying a hand on their forearms. When she was flushed with two vodka tonics and the regard of men, she steered us towards Robert Belsky. He was standing by the buffet table, eating cocktail meatballs directly from the chafing dish. Behind him, his wife held two drinks.

  Belsky saw us coming, and he reached out to touch Liz at the small of her back. “How’d you persuade Mr. Big to go slumming tonight? We’re on the first floor here. And no view.” He speared a meatball with his toothpick and winked at me over Liz’s shoulder. “He’s such a big shot now, I thought he’d come with a bigger entourage. Lackeys. Fan clubbers.”

  She laughed lightly and looked over his shoulder. “It’s good to see you, Joyce.”

  Belsky’s wife had just taken a sip and had an ice cube in her mouth, but she raised her glass in greeting.

  “What about me?” Belsky said. “What am I, chopped liver?”

  Liz sidestepped away from his touch now, and her embarrassment for Joyce made her flush. She slipped off her fitted jacket.

  “Va-voom!” Belsky said.

  Joyce laughed. “No kidding. You look fantastic.”

  My first year in high school, my father began to comment on other women in front of my mother. She always laughed too, but I can’t help but wonder how the memory of it made her feel when she was alone, surgaring her tea or appraising her reflection in the diamond-shaped mirror above her dresser.

  Belsky punched me in the shoulder. “How’d a sap like you ever rate a woman like that?”

  “I’m a lucky man.”

  “I guess the nickname can stick then.”

  “What nickname is that?” Liz said.

  “Lucky Luther. I was thinking of changing it now that he’s under the microscope.”

  She said, “You can’t be talking about that routine investigation.”

  “Jury’s out on routine, sweetheart.”

  She rolled her eyes and took a lipstick and mirror from her purse.

  He said, “A dam like that one nearly wiped out half of Los Angeles in 1971. It was during an earthquake about the size of the one we had last month.”

  She applied a fresh layer and pressed her lips together.

  He said, “You never know what they might find.”

  Liz snapped her little bag shut and laughed. “I know exactly what they’ll find,” she said, and she kissed me full on the mouth.

  She pulled back a few inches and looked me in the eye and smoothed the shoulders of my sport coat. Then she licked her thumb and rubbed the trace of her kiss from my lips, and it was this, not the kiss itself, that made me blush.

  “You win,” Belsky said. “The nickname stands.” Joyce tipped back her cup for a last cube of ice, but it clung to the bottom by molecular cohesion. Liz saw this too, and it touched both of us in the same way. We looked at the carpet.

  Belsky stabbed another meatball with his toothpick and looked at me, eyebrows raised. “’Course I bet you’re counting on a downgrade in a few months.”

  For a moment, I thought he was referring to my wife. “A downgrade in what?”

  “Office views.”

  I looked at him.

  He turned to Liz, as if he were sharing a secret. “Don’s is on the southeast corner. Higher, and closer to Krepps, but no view of the dome.”

  I shook my head.

  Belsky leaned towards my wife. “That’s what a shoo-in he is,” he whispered, loud enough so I could hear it. Joyce had set her empty cup on the table and was stealing a sip of her husband’s drink. He cupped a hand to Liz’s ear, “He doesn’t even have to think of me as competition.”

  We did not stay long after this. We stood and talked with Don and Lorraine for ten minutes about Maui, where they were about to go for Don’s annual vacation, and where I imagined—all right, I’ll admit I couldn’t help thinking about it—he might make his decision about retirement. Two men carrying a cake aflame with candles appeared from the swinging kitchen door behind a row of potted palms, and they placed it on a table near the four of us. Someone dimmed the lights, and Don’s face was lit up by candle fire and affection for his wife, at whom he glanced just before he took a deep breath and blew.

  Liz and I shared a piece of cake, standing alone in the corner, and although even after two vodkas she had the judgment to restrain herself from whispers on the subject, she kept cutting looks at Belsky or at Don and then looking at me smugly. She did not really need words. In the two weeks s
ince I’d begun to mislead her, she had been formulating an unwritten list of the differences between Belsky and me. She took us on another neighborhood walk to his house, which she had clearly driven past herself since our last visit, to allow me to see a sloping flagstone driveway that in time would buckle because the contractor had not used edge boards. “You’re more careful,” she had said in bed that night. And when I told her about his reaction to the new office assignments, she had said, “You’re more mature.”

  Now she set down our plate, and as she led me towards the door we saw Joyce following Belsky towards the buffet. Liz took me through the lobby, out through the big oak doors into the fresh cool air and the view of the capitol, lit at night in a way that always made me feel quiet and respectful. She took my hand, and it came to me with sudden certainty just how she would exaggerate his rivalrous barbs and harmless flirtations. I was surprised by the dread this made me feel.

  “Add two more to the list,” she said. She was grinning but her eyes flitted from my eyes to my mouth and back again.

  “What would those be?”

  “Not morbidly competitive.”

  “And?”

  “Better husband,” she said.

  THREE NIGHTS LATER WE WOKE TO A SOUND OUTSIDE: SOMETHING striking the east wall near my study and Elliot’s bedroom. Liz rose quickly and opened a window. I joined her there, our hands touching on the sill. We saw no movement in the dark yard, but a girl’s voice drifted up to us, a harsh whisper.

  “It’s me. Peggy.”

  Elliot’s voice answered. “What?”

  “Peggy Lefkowitz. From school.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Come down a second.”

  He didn’t answer right away. Crickets pulsed beneath the elm tree. Then he said, “I can’t.”

  “I just want to talk to you.”

  “You better go,” he said.

  “Elliot.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. His window slid shut. I looked at Liz, but she was straining to see something on the lawn. A girl had appeared beneath our window. In the moonlight, I could make out the silver hardware on her leather jacket. She stepped behind our elm tree, and we heard her clothes rustling, and then a liquid pitting. She was urinating on our lawn.

  By the time she started to pull up her jeans, Liz was halfway down the stairs. I caught up with her at the kitchen door, and as she threw it open, I worried that in the heat of her indignation, she might provoke her. Although it seems ludicrous now, I thought it was possible that the girl would hit Liz, or knock her down, but it turned out her instincts were a lot better than this. Before Liz had even opened her mouth to confront her, Peggy turned to run.

  “Wait!” Liz said.

  But she was already running. Liz yelled, “I just want to invite you inside.”

  Peggy stopped and regarded Liz for the first time. I was always startled anew to see the range of people who were caught short by her beauty. The girl’s own hair was short on one side, hanging no further than her earlobe, and long, to her shoulder, on the other. “What do you want?” she said.

  “I heard you say you wanted to talk to Elliot.”

  “So?”

  Liz put her hands on her hips in the teasing manner I remembered from her days at the bank. “So why not do it inside where it’s not so damp?”

  Then, in another of the string of events that fall that should have inured me to surprise, Peggy allowed herself to be turned, and inside, when Liz offered her something to drink, she asked for milk. She sat at our kitchen table waiting. Her silver rings clinked against the side of the glass. She didn’t wipe her lip after she sipped, and a rim of white masked her dark lipstick.

  “Luther,” Liz said—she closed the refrigerator door—“why don’t you go up and get Elliot?”

  “Oh,” I said, and could think of nothing further. She and the girl both looked at me, waiting for me to leave.

  In the front hall, I paused, hoping to hear what my wife had to say to her, but the sound was muffled except for a surprising shock of laughter: the girl’s. I wiped my T-shirt. “Crazy,” I said quietly, just to test the sound of it, and then looked at my hands: palms, then backs. Stingy nail beds and thick knuckles. My father’s hands. I heard Liz laugh now, and then Peggy, and then Liz together with her. A little fugue of laughter. Then I looked up the stairs and to my embarrassment saw Elliot there, looking down at me over the banister. I opened my mouth to normalize the scene, but he put his finger to his lips and walked back down the hall to his bedroom.

  Briefly, excuses for the eavesdropping he had witnessed occurred to me, and a handful of weird explanations for the word I had muttered, but I was able to keep myself from refining these as I walked up the stairs.

  When I entered his room, he was seated on the edge of his bed.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  On his wall was a calendar with a girl in a swimsuit the color of ripe limes that had not been there the last time I visited. His hands lay open-palmed on his race-car bedspread. It could be disorienting, parenting.

  I said, “Your mom was hoping you might come downstairs.”

  “Is Peggy in there?”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “And Mom is talking to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Telling her to beat it, I guess.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. His face registered no alarm, and the realization that he may have expected this unnerved me. This evening was going somewhere everyone but me seemed to understand. “I think she’s hoping you two might talk before she calls Peggy’s mom.”

  He exhaled sharply, just like his mother. “Does she know Peggy has been on probation three times this year?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Does she know Peggy smokes clove cigarettes?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Does she know Peggy pees in public?”

  “She may have surmised that, yes.”

  He looked at me fully.

  I said, “She peed on our lawn after you closed your window.”

  He laughed briefly at this, with what appeared to be genuine appreciation, but stopped abruptly and a sadness seemed to overtake him. “Her hair is weird too,” he said.

  “Original, I would have called it.”

  He touched his glasses, the stalling gesture that in earlier years was the most frequent prelude to revelation. “You still haven’t invited me to your office.”

  “How about Friday?” I said.

  For as many as thirty seconds he held still enough for tension to settle on the features of our landscape like strong lighting—how close I’d inadvertently come to him, standing next to his bed; a reddened cuticle around his thumbnail; my hands trembling as I slipped them self-consciously into the pockets of my robe—but whatever he was gathering the courage to say, he thought better of it. He stood and walked past me out of the room.

  There was a time when the scenarios presented within my home seemed fairly predictable to me, but following my bald son down the hall at midnight toward a girl in leather who whispered with my wife in the kitchen, I had lost all confidence that I might know how things would unfold. His loose-fitting pajamas preceded me down the stairs, and when I entered, Liz was sitting at the kitchen table. Peggy stood behind her, a pair of scissors in hand. She had cut a good seven inches off the back of Liz’s hair, and the yellow strands lay on the tile, splayed like straw.

  Peggy raised the scissors slightly, like waving. “Hi, Elliot.”

  Liz looked up at us, brushing loose hair from her chest and shoulders. “Peggy’s giving me a new style. Short in the back and really long bangs. Who has it again?” She turned her head over her shoulder toward Peggy, inquiring.

  “Flock of Seagulls,” said Elliot.

  Peggy grinned, and Liz turned to him.

  “Flock of Seagulls,” she said.

  We watched Peggy finish, and then Liz insisted she and I go outside a moment so she could f
eel the cool air on her bare neck. When she’d closed the door behind us, she explained that this was the only place where Elliot and Peggy could feel sure we were not eavesdropping, and in the cold damp grass she turned back towards the house. It was dark except for our bedroom light, and of course the light from the kitchen, and we could see the two of them at the table, talking. Elliot’s hands stayed on the table, and Peggy’s gestured once or twice, but mostly she kept them still as well, both of them moved to shyness it seemed, by the hour, and by Liz’s impulsiveness maybe, but most of all by the sudden surprise of their privacy.

  “What do you suppose they’re talking about?” I said. I could hear the filter on our neighbor’s pool cycle on. I was barefoot, and I was cold.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  “You’re not curious?”

  “Of course I’m curious; I meant it doesn’t matter to them. They’re making small talk. Whatever it is, it’s not what they’re thinking.”

  This made me take her hand.

  And in the days that followed, I found myself distracted from Elliot’s change by my wife’s. I watched the nape of her neck as she inclined her head over a pan of bacon, or leaned over the sink to take a cupped handful of water to rinse her mouth at night. When I met her for lunch one day that week, I did not recognize her. I saw her only as an attractive stranger, and when I realized it was my own wife, I felt a flush of excitement that I let pass before I stepped from the door to join her. As much as I had loved her long hair, at moments both the extremity and the contrast of this cut were thrilling. The night she did it, she had pulled off her T-shirt in our bathroom and stood, head bent over the counter, so I could brush the cuttings from her shoulder blades. She was speculating with relish about the crush Peggy had on our son, and her voice faded in and out as I looked at a chain of small pale freckles along her spine. The next morning she woke me in the midst of an unsettling dream to ask me what I thought of the cut, and I struggled from a still-vivid half-world to tell her part of the truth—that I thought she looked beautiful, that a change was fun. But all the while I was distracted by the memory of a short-haired woman who had stepped from behind a curtain and put her hand to my mouth in my dream. I kept track of a weak intention to interject mention of this as we talked, and thought of it again when Liz peeked out of the shower to ask me for a new bar of soap, but in the end I never did. It would only have frightened her. No woman can imagine how little the male desire for variety actually means in the context of love.