Then Nat and I start home. When you love someone, he is your life. The first principle of existence. And because of that, he has the power to change you and everything you know. It is like suddenly turning a map over so that south is at the top. It's still correct, still able to get you to anyplace you want to go. But it could not seem more different.
As an intellectual matter, I remember that I clerked for Nat's father and was once mad for him. I remember that I actually knew Rusty long before I first met Nat. But Nat was someone else then, a stick figure compared with the person who now dominates my life, while Rusty's chief significance today lies in the inevitable ways he can affect his son. My life is Nat. With Rusty gone, I feel the utter solidity of that fact.
We are both quiet, humming with our stuff. It has been quite a night.
"I need to tell you something," I say suddenly as we are crossing the Nearing Bridge. There is pink light leaking up from the horizon, but the buildings in Center City are still blazing, reflecting gorgeously on the water.
"What?" he asks.
"It's upsetting, but I want you to hear this now. Okay?"
When I glance over, he nods, looking darkly pensive beneath those thick eyebrows.
"When I moved in with Dede Wirklich after my divorce, I was working at Masterston Buff, writing ad copy, and still trying to finish college at night. And I was taking this advanced macroeconomics class in the U Business School. I'd gotten an A plus in Intro Econ, and I thought I was good at math and could sail through. The prof was Garth Morse. Remember that name? He was one of Clinton's economic advisers, and he's still on TV all the time, because he's really smooth and good-looking, and I thought it would be totally cool to take a class from somebody like that. But it was way, way over my head, with all these out-there equations that the B students understood instantly. I was upset anyway about leaving Paul and having a hard time concentrating, and I got back the midterm and there was this big fat F. So I went to see Morse. And I was in his office about ten minutes, and he gives me this long, long look, like he's seen too many old movies, and says, 'This is too complicated, we need to talk about it over dinner.' And okay, I wasn't totally surprised. He had a reputation. He thought he was God's gift. And Dede was like, 'Are you crazy, go ahead, you want to stay in college forever?' He really was good-looking and a pretty exciting, interesting guy, totally charismatic. But still. His wife was pregnant. I don't remember how I knew that-maybe he mentioned it in class-but that part really bothered me. But Dede had a point, I needed to graduate and move on, and I really couldn't stand just then, right after my marriage ended, to fail at anything else. And so-"
Nat hits the brakes so hard that I clutch and think about the air bag, when I can think at all. I look out the windshield to see what we hit. We are on the shoulder, right at the foot of the bridge.
"Are you okay?" I ask.
He has released his seat belt so he can bring his face close to mine.
"Why are you telling me this?" he asks. "Why now? Tonight?"
I shrug. "Because I'm sleep-deprived?"
"Do you love me?" he asks me then.
"Of course. Of course. Like I've never loved anybody else." I so mean that. He knows. I know he knows.
"Do you think I love you?"
"Yes."
"I love you," he says. "I love you. I don't need to know the worst things you've ever done. I know you had a rough time getting to me. And I had a rough time getting to you. But we're together. And together we're better people than we've ever been. I really believe that. That's all." He leans over to kiss me softly, looks in my eyes another second, then checks the mirrors before pulling the car back onto the road.
When you are twenty, you come to your boyfriends fresh. You are still hoping to find The One, and everybody who went before is really just a stepping-stone to that place and doesn't really matter. But at thirty-six-thirty-six!-that's no longer the case. You have been to the summit, believed in somebody's love forever, had the greatest sex you think you'll ever know-and somehow moved on to find something else. You have come to whoever is with you now along a rope line of experiences. You both know it. You cannot pretend what's in the past didn't happen. But it's the past, the way Sodom and Gomorrah lay in ash behind Lot's wife, who should have known better than to look back. Everybody understands when you get to this age that you carry history along, a person, a time whose effects cannot be fully forgotten. Nat has Kat, who I know still e-mails now and then and manages to upset him. And that is how it will be with Rusty and what happened with him. I see that now. He will be like the telltale heart still beating every now and then in the wall. But gone. It will be the past I lived, crazy but over, the past that somehow brought me to the life I really, really want that I will live every day with Nat.
CHAPTER 45
Rusty, August 25, 2009
I was in my teens before I realized my parents were not a physical match. Their marriage had been arranged in the old-country manner. He was a penniless refugee, piercingly handsome, and she was a dowdy old maid-twenty-three-from a family with property, meaning the three-flat in which my mother lived until the day she died. I am sure she was thrilled with him at first, while I doubt he ever tried to pretend he was enamored and grew ever more surly.
Every Friday night when I was a boy, my father disappeared after dinner. I looked forward to that, truth be told, since it meant I would not have to sleep on the floor in my mother's bedroom, locked in there, which was how we hid out from his frequent drunken rages. When I was in grade school, I assumed my father was spending his Friday nights in a tavern or playing pinochle, both routine pastimes for him, but he seldom came home from his carousing and instead went directly to the bakery to begin preparing for Saturday morning. But one Friday night when I was thirteen, my mother started a small kitchen fire. Most of the damage was to her-she was high-strung and fretful by nature-and the parade of firemen who stormed into her house reduced her to a state in which all she could do was shriek for my father.
I went to the tavern first, where one of my father's acquaintances-he really did not have friends-took mercy on me and my obvious agitation and said, as I was leaving, 'Hey, kid. Try the Hotel Delaney over on Western.' When I told the desk clerk there that I had to find Ivan Sabich, he gave me a watery, unhappy look but finally grunted out a number. It was not the kind of place where there were phones in the rooms in those days. I would say that even as I thumped up the filthy stairs, with the carpet worn to its backing and the halls reeking of some naphthalike agent used to control the infestation of pests, I was actually in some doubt about what I would find. But when I knocked, I recognized the woman, Ruth Plynk, a widow a good decade older than my father, who peered through the crack in the door in her slip.
I don't know why she came to the door. Maybe because my father was in the john. Probably because he was afraid the desk clerk had come up for more money.
'Tell him the house is on fire,' I said, and left. I did not know exactly what I felt-shame and anger. But mostly disbelief. The world was different, my world. After that, I sat enraged at dinner every Friday night, because my father hummed during the meals, the only time during the week that any sound came from him that bore even a remote resemblance to music.