"It's okay," he says, trying to comfort me.
"You can trust me. I'm not yelling at you now, am I? I'm speaking softly. Ain't I?"
He nods mistrustfully (and I want to raise my voice and begin yelling at him again to make him believe I never yell at him at all. But I don't. I don't want to scare him again. I don't ever really want to frighten any of them and am always sorry and disgusted with myself afterward when I do. Almost always. But only after I succeed in bullying them; if I try to bully them and fail, I am distraught. And frightened. I am sorry now that I have just intimidated them all; and in speaking to my boy, I am trying to apologize to my wife and daughter as well. I want them to see I am sorry; but I don't want to say so. I want to be forgiven).
"Why do you look that way?" I ask him, in a troubled, slightly nagging voice (pleading with him to relax and feel free and safe and happy with me). "Why do you look so worried?"
"It's okay."
"You can trust me," I promise.
"It's just the way I look."
"And I wasn't yelling at you before, either," I continue uncontrollably. "Sometimes when a person raises his voice and speaks loudly, it isn't because he's yelling at you or even angry, but only because he wants you to believe what he's saying. He does it for. emphasis. He wants to be. emphatic. That's what the word emphatic means." I pause in annoyance as I see my boy catch my daughter's eyes for an instant and then roll his gaze upward with a dramatic look of tedium (as both my children are apt to do ostentatiously when one of us is lecturing them at length for doing something we deem hazardous, or inundating them with unnecessary directions or repetitious questions. I would rather have him bored with me now and making fun than panic-stricken. So I continue peaceably, persuasively, instead of reprimanding him tartly, although my dignity was offended for a second). "Now that's what I was doing when I raised my voice a bit before," I continue. "I was being. emphatic. I wanted you to believe that I wasn't going to yell at you and that I wasn't angry with you. And it was exactly the same when I was speaking with them," I lie. "I wasn't yelling at them, either."
"I know," he says. "I know it now."
"And I'm not yelling at you now, am I?"
"No."
"So I was right, wasn't I?"
"Yes. It's okay."
"Good. I'm glad you understand. And that's why. " I conclude wryly, with a smile — and somehow I know he guesses the joke I'm about to make and that he is going to interrupt and make it for me. I pause, to give him time.
". you yelled at me!" he says.
"Right!" I guffaw.
(Our minds are very much alike, his and mine, in our humor and our forebodings.)
"Does it," he ventures ahead boldly on his wave of success, with a sidelong glance at my wife that glitters with impish intent, "give you a pain in the ass, too?"
"Oh, my!" I exclaim. (My first impulse is to guffaw again; my next is to protect him from any sanctimonious reproof that might come from my wife for his using the word ass. Quickly, clowning, laughing, mugging with grossly burlesqued alarm, before my wife can react at all, I cry:) "Now, she's going to yell at you!"
"She's not!"
"No?"
"Are you?"
But my wife is glad (not mad) and laughs merrily with relief (because she sees I am glad now, too, and not mad at her or my daughter anymore).
"No, but you're a devil and a rascal," she upbraids him affectionately. "Because you knew I wouldn't yell at you this time if you said that word."
"What word?" asks my boy, with a feigned look of innocence. "Ass?"
"Don't say it again!"
"Ass?"
"You're not going to make me say it!"
"What? Ass?" asks my daughter, joining in friskily.
"I give up." My wife throws her arms out mirthfully in exasperation. "What am I going to do with them?"
"Say ass," I advise.
"Ass!" my wife blares obligingly, extending her face out toward both of them like an elephant's trunk. They roar with gulping laughter. "Ass! Ass, ass, ass, ass, ass!"
All of them are laughing hysterically now.
My daughter is unable to keep her balance in the sweeping exhilaration she experiences at finding herself released so unexpectedly, without penalty, from the excoriating conflict she had devised and in which she had so swiftly found herself the tortured victim. She falls against my boy joyously; they hug each other with immense delight and go staggering wildly all about my study, bumping into us and each other and into the superfluous chairs my wife keeps sneaking in when she has no better place to put them. My boy is pleased with himself beyond measure, beside himself with glee and ecstasy at having used his dirty word with impetuous imagination and gotten away with it and at having transported us all to a spirit of warmth and generous good feeling from the savage rancor with which we had been smashing each other. We are close now, intimate, respectful, and informal. The children bump and hug each other and continue to laugh hilariously. I watch them with affection (feeling complacent and benign). I am glad they are mine.
"They're really such good kids," my wife murmurs pensively in my ear, so that only I will hear.
I nod in agreement, feeling wistful and pleased (with myself, too, and with her). I slip my arm around her waist and draw her to my side. She moves willingly, her body limber, and fits herself against me compliantly. I get an erection. (I would lay her now if we were alone. We would lay each other.) I slide my hand down over her ass and follow the curve in at the bottom toward her box. She stretches away.
"Later," she cautions guardedly.
"No, now," I demand, teasingly.
"You're crazy."
"I might not have it later."
"You will. You'd better," she laughs. "I'll see that you do." I laugh too.
And that is the needful service performed for us so regularly and artlessly by this angelic little boy of mine ("He isn't real," my daughter has complained about him enviously. "He's never mean. He never gets mad."), who is no better off than the rest of us (who may be considerably worse off, in fact, because he is only nine and has already been frightened of just about everything, heights and kidnapping, sharks, crabs, drunks, adults who stare, sheriffs, unkempt handymen, wars, Italians, and me. He isn't afraid of monsters or ghosts so much, because monsters and ghosts are silly. He is afraid of human beings. He veers away from cripples. He welcomes the phenomenon of cops, because he has the dim hope they will safeguard him from all the rest, even from me), to draw us together again by reminding us who we are and what we know of each other, to stop the three of us just in time and make us step back — by evoking and recalling to us the great need and capacity for affection each of us has hidden away very deep inside, like a yawning wound, affection for him, and perhaps for each other — from mangling each other willfully, brutally, and irreparably, with much malice and happiness aforethought, if we have not maimed each other permanently already. I believe he pulls us together as a family and keeps us together. (I often think of leaving and always have. My daughter can't wait to get away, or says she can't.) I think we will fall apart as a family when he grows up and moves away. (I love him so much I just know he is going to die.)
"You like him more than me," my daughter has said.
"No," I answer, lying, because I do not always wish to outfox her, and because she sometimes seems so barren of hope that I find myself grieving silently alongside her, as though at an open coffin or grave in which her future is lying dead already. (She is not yet sweet sixteen, but it sometimes seems to both of us that she has already missed all boats. When?) "But you must admit, darling, that in many ways, he is much more likable."