“I imagine the kind of night you’re having,” the voice came back, now more careful and allied.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Maya said.
“We’re glad he’s fine,” she said. “It’s the most important.”
Maya asked for detail beyond what Alex had told her, but there was nothing.
“He said you have boys of your own,” Maya said, deflated but not wishing to let go.
“Three,” Nina Benton said.
“A handful,” Maya said enviously.
“Handful because each is disabled.”
“Oh,” Maya said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” the voice said. “They’re great boys.”
Maya apologized again. Apparently, she had made her husband’s view on handicaps also her own.
“I’m so scared,” she blurted out. Then she apologized a third time. “I’m sorry. I know you can’t help me.”
“Now listen to me,” Nina Benton said. “I’m putting you off only because I have to get these boys into bed. We break routine, and all hell goes loose. But you can talk to me. You can call me tomorrow. You want to come here in the afternoon and have coffee, I’ll make time.”
“Thank you,” Maya whispered. “I can’t drive.” It sounded like a disability of her own. She said another thanks and hung up. She felt envy for the happy bedlam on the other end of the line. Still wearing her clothes, she went down on the bed and collapsed into a deep, hopeless slumber, the soft rumble of the others talking below her. Her final thought was a thanks that the affliction she felt made her want to sleep instead of unable to.
+
His mother having turned to the dishes in the sink and his father to the newspaper that had gone untouched because of Max, Alex left the kitchen and took the stairs toward his son’s bedroom. The door creaked slightly when he opened it, and he reminded himself again to oil the hinges. His son — Alex felt encouragement and surprise — was in bed; Alex had kept his skepticism to himself when Raisa had declared, on her return to the kitchen, that the boy had been set up there. (She had paused shyly to give the others a chance to admire her achievement; through the affection only a grandmother could give she had managed to solve the problem.)
Max was six when he’d asked Alex to set up a tent for him to sleep outside. Alex had just finished reading a bedtime story about Arctic explorers; a satisfied silence had descended on the room, Alex seated in an old armchair and his son interred in a pile of blankets. A lamp burned softly from Max’s night table, the honeyed light casting the shadows that signal the decline of the day, a son ready to rest and a wife downstairs finishing the dishes before the adults make the last of the evening. Alex himself had nearly nodded off when Max said, with his customary directness, “Papa, would you build me a tent outside? I want to sleep there.”
Alex felt buoyed by an affirmation of which his son couldn’t be aware. Alex and Maya had argued about the language in which Max should receive his bedtime reading. English, said Maya; he was an American. Russian, said Alex; he would get plenty of America elsewhere. Alex and Maya’s magnificent homeland could rot in hell, but a second language would only help Max in the future. Alex had won, partly because he did the bedtime reading, but the victory hadn’t been satisfactory because the Russian-language books offered a somewhat selective view of history, in which the Arctic — and outer space, and medicine — were conquered exclusively by Russian and Soviet visionaries. But more, not less, Russian was necessary — Max, speaking Russian, had made an elementary mistake: He had said “build,” not “set up,” a tent.
“What?” Alex said. “You want to be like the explorers?”
Max shook his head no, the blond wind chimes swinging to and fro.
“When it gets warm,” Alex said. “There’s snow on the ground.”
“If you wrap up, it’s not cold,” Max said, and turned away from the light.
Alex sat, turning over this remark, until he realized Max must have been recalling something one of the explorers had done. He rose, kissed his son good night, and went downstairs.
But his son had meant “build.” Compliantly, Max had waited until that year’s snow left the ground and was found one April Saturday in the Rubins’ backyard, pulling a canvas drop cloth many times his size over a primitive contraption of acacia poles that he had scavenged in the suburban woods beyond the edge of their property. The drop cloth Max had scavenged from their neighbor Vincenzo, with whom the Rubins were adversarial due to Vincenzo’s aggressive curtailment of the pygmy pines Alex had installed on the edge of his lot. To the boy, however, Vincenzo had lent the paint-spattered drop cloth with pleasure, imagining correctly that Max was freelancing and his dickhead father would erupt upon seeing his immaculate lawn staked with poles and a drop cloth with the drippings of ten years of house paint. Max had only had to fill out a chit that the old Italian, smelling of wine, thrust at the parents when they reluctantly came to inquire. Vincenzo fermented wine in a shed at the edge of his lot, and though he offered none to the Rubins, he shared with pleasure the swarming insects the process attracted; Maya was convinced Vincenzo was to blame for the hornets that had descended on Max on the deck when he was a toddler.
Alex would not remain indebted to Vincenzo; the canvas was stripped and the poles returned to the woods; his son would have a proper tent. Alex could not believe that something that could fit, folded, in the crook of his arm, could cost so much at the camping store on Route 23. The smaller they are, the more expensive they are, the salesman told him, and Alex felt that in these words was encapsulated the full difference between Russia and America. He presented it to his son like a keepsake from the dead ice of a northern expedition. Max nodded politely, as if this, too, would do, and raced to the backyard as Maya shouted after him to remember to say what when his father gave him a gift. Alex patted Maya on the shoulder munificently and strode toward the fervent unpacking taking place on a tender patch of grass he had so recently had the mowing service attend to. “This way, this way,” he gently took the poles and fasteners from his son, but America had made great advances in tent making since Eugene and friends had set up filched army canvases on a birch-flanked clearing outside Minsk as little Alex observed, and Alex had to sheepishly give up the materials to his son, who had the contraption billowing in the crisp springtime wind in just minutes.
Now, as Alex surveyed his son from the threshold, he felt a strange cheerfulness. Now, Alex was needed for something much greater than building a tent. Maya’s love for their son was complete but wishful, and blinded by wishfulness; patiently, Alex had kept his mouth closed so that Maya could have what she wanted. But now, his insight was needed. Alex’s parents would have to receive their say, but he had no intention of allowing them anything other than that. He was Max’s father.
He strode into the bedroom and ran his hand over Max’s blanket. Max sat up, as if he would have to get dressed and go off somewhere. He put his shoulders forward and stared up at his father.