“Thanks anyway, Ned,” I said. I walked down the long hallway, past the living room, where most people had congregated, through the den, where Keith was watching football and explaining it to Marco, and out the French doors to the terrace and the night air.
Windows were lit in the big buildings across Park Avenue, and people were moving in them. Parties, families. Between the buildings, I saw the dark mass of Central Park and the smaller, colder lights of the West Side. From up here, the streets were silent. A chilly breeze carried some of the heat from my face. I leaned against the stone parapet and breathed out slowly.
Insufferable prick though he was, David had a point. But it wasn’t just me that was predictable-it was that whole sorry fracas. My family and I have been having that argument, or something like it, for years.
There’ve been a few changes. Before career prospects, it had been about the company and the hours that I kept, and before that, about the probations and the suspensions from school. And before it was Ned, it had been my uncles offering the well-intentioned, sensible advice. Until her death, the kind words were spoken not by David, but by my mother, Elaine. And ever since my father, Philip, passed away, we’d been short one bemused, distracted spectator.
But the basic quarrel-about irresponsibility, expectations, and disappointment, about waste and embarrassment-endures. It’s old business, and it goes all the way back to Philip and Elaine, and their larger struggle.
It wasn’t outright war between them-there were no pitched battles, and it wasn’t that well organized. It was more a simmering border feud, with fierce skirmishes, stretches of nervous quiet, and an endless tallying of encroachments. But as to who was defending what territories, and against whom, I couldn’t say. Nor can I say how I became my father’s proxy in these firefights-how I became a lightning rod for so much of my mother’s disapproval and discontent. Maybe I was just less expert than my siblings at keeping out of the crossfire-at keeping my head down or choosing sides.
A door opened, and there were slow footsteps. Lauren stood next to me.
“Sorry,” she said. She spoke softly. I laughed a little.
“I won’t say I told you so. ”
“Please don’t. I feel lousy enough as it is. I dragged you here, and told you this wouldn’t happen, and…”
“We’ve been at this a long time, Laurie. It’s not your fault.” She looked down at the street.
“Ned means well,” she said after a while.
“And David?” I asked.
“David’s a putz.” She laughed, and I laughed with her.
“His Mom impression is coming along,” I said. “Close your eyes, and you can’t tell the difference.”
Lauren turned to look at me. “She meant well, too, you know. Really.”
“If you say so.”
“It’s just that… you were too much like Dad,” Lauren said. “At least she thought you were.” A cold gust blew across the terrace, and I felt her shiver beside me. She crossed her arms, hugging herself.
“And that was by definition a bad thing, right?” I asked. “She did marry the guy, after all.” We were quiet, and watched a plane crawl across the sky.
“Ever wonder why?” she asked. “Ever wonder what the hell they saw in each other?” I chuckled.
“I don’t give it a lot of thought,” I said. “There’s only so much you can know about people-and less still about marriages. And when it comes to your parents’ marriage-forget it.”
“Is that a professional opinion?”
“If you asked me professionally, I’d say what I say to people who want their spouses followed: Are you sure you want to know? ” She laughed a little.
“Probably not. It’s a little too close to thinking about them having sex-it’d cost me a fortune in therapy.” The breeze picked up, and Lauren shivered again.
“Go in,” I said. “You’ll catch a chill.”
“You come too.” She rubbed her arms.
“In a minute,” I said.
I watched Lauren go inside and stand by Keith and Marco in the den. In another incarnation, the room had been my father’s study-the site of what my uncles called his very early retirement. It had been lined, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves then, and furnished with a broken-down leather sofa, a big leather chair, and a small writing table-all gone now. With its high windows and big view of sky, the room had seemed to me, at various times, like a treehouse, a lighthouse, and a sailboat. He’d called it his duck blind.
It wasn’t forbidden to us-we could go in when we liked. But I was the only one who ever did. I’d find him sprawled on the sofa, or in the chair, or sometimes writing or sketching at his small table, and I’d sprawl too, and read with him in silence. When I was older, he’d sometimes pull a volume off the shelf and toss it to me. He never said more than “You might like it,” and he never asked afterward if I had. It was an eclectic list-poetry and fiction mostly-Rilke, Akhmatova, Borges, Raymond Chandler, Robertson Davies, John Fante, Philip Dick-and if there was a message there, I couldn’t divine it.
He’d worked at Klein, in a job my grandfather made for him there, and one day, after twelve years, he’d stopped going-I never knew why. One of many things I never knew-about him, about them both.
I put my palms on the coping and felt the cold seep into my hands. I watched the figures move in the windows across the way. I thought about my words to Lauren and shook my head.
“Are you sure you want to know?”
“A fool for a client,” I said to myself.
On paper, they had little in common. He was an only child, the end of an old WASP line whose money and distinction were spent before he was born. His legacy, he used to say, was a mildewed shack on Fisher’s Island, a decent squash game, and a bulletproof liver. She was the youngest of four-the only daughter. Her family was old too, but not WASP. She didn’t play squash, didn’t drink much, and her inheritance was considerably bigger than a shack.
They met at a party in someone’s apartment off Washington Square. They were married four months later in city hall. They flew to Italy that same day, and stayed there for over a year. It was, as far as I know, her only act of rebellion. She was four months’ pregnant when they returned.
I don’t know why they married, or why they left the country afterward, or why they stayed away so long, or why they came back. I don’t know why Philip took the job at Klein in the first place, or why he stopped when he did, to spend his time in the study or on a squash court or with a pitcher of martinis. And while I can guess about Elaine’s anger, I don’t know why she married Philip to begin with, if what she wanted was the life she’d always had. What had she been looking for?
I never asked Philip about his work, and by the time I’d had my own brush with Wall Street, it was too late to compare notes. So I never knew what he’d made of it all-if his experience was anything like mine. Was he appalled by the greed and self-indulgence? Was he stunned by the bureaucracy and politicking? Was he bored silly? Was he able to find even a single thing there to care about? I never knew.
French doors opened from the living room, and Tyler stepped outside. “The boys are asking for you.”
They were in Derek’s room, doing something intricate with Legos. I got down on the floor and helped them do it.
“You okay, Uncle Johnny?” Alec asked. He peered at me over the lid of a toy chest.
“I’m fine, buddy. Pass those green pieces over, okay?”
After the Legos, we played with Hot Wheels for a while, and then we built an elaborate railroad out of wooden tracks. Then Derek tried to teach me to play something on his Game Boy, but the point of the thing eluded me, and I couldn’t work the controls reliably. Then we played soccer with a Nerf ball, then I was a zombie, and then I tickled them both till they were sweaty and hoarse and threatening to barf. It was getting late for them by then, and they needed to catch their breath, and so did I, so we sprawled sideways on Derek’s bed, with me in the middle, and I read six or eight stories to them.