She said nothing the next day. Her work was going slowly. She tried to keep her mind on Howard Hawks and Elia Kazan, but her thoughts kept returning to the hostess. She had altered the atmosphere surrounding the boy’s time home. And now the mother was having trouble meeting her self-imposed deadlines. She went by the restaurant the following afternoon after the lunch tables had cleared. The hostess was refilling hot pepper and grated cheese dispensers.
“Do you know who I am?” the mother asked, when she stopped by.
“You’re Phillip’s mother.”
She didn’t like her using his name, though of course it would have been strange for her not to know it by now. “Yes,” she said.
“I’m Holly.” She said it as though the mother had heard all about someone named Holly.
“He’s nineteen, you know.”
“I know.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“No, I guess it isn’t. Can I get you a table?”
She talked with her husband that day. She didn’t tell him what she’d seen, simply that Phillip was dating a hostess from Buongiorno’s.
“So?”
“So I don’t like it.”
“Don’t be such a snob.”
“You haven’t seen her.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“You’d know if you saw her,” she said. Then added, “She’s easy.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw the two of them.”
“You saw them.”
“You know.”
“Having sex.”
“Practically.”
“Do you want me to talk with him?”
“No. I just wanted to know what you think.”
“I think it’s fairly normal, don’t you?”
It was nearly two years since the mother and father had decided to undergo a trial separation. The mother had believed it was her decision, because he had fought it. But once they’d gone through with it, he had more easily adapted to the new set of circumstances. Now the husband lived in Seattle, a few blocks from the fish and vegetable stalls of Pike Place Market. The mother had spent time there in graduate school, and then again two years ago when they’d decided to travel around the Pacific Northwest. She hadn’t known then he’d been thinking of moving there, once the boy left for college. He was the one who was supposed to be exiled, but while he had landed within a lively social circle, the mother had found it hard to find any sort of community. She had been the less social of the two and now she was in his town with his friends. There were three or four people who stuck closely by her, but most of their friends had stopped calling or inviting her to parties. Not that she would have gone, necessarily. She hadn’t been feeling particularly social. She was abstractly aware of the toll the separation had taken on her. She’d been needing a glass of red wine or two in the evening to get to sleep, and some nights she couldn’t resist calling him, knowing it was the West Coast and he’d still be awake. She wouldn’t talk about their problems, she’d simply talk of her day and matters outside of them and then listen to his advice, or she’d ask about his life out there and he’d tell her, as though they were new friends beginning to learn about one another. Her work meanwhile had flourished; she’d finished one book, started another, and had begun contributing magazine pieces. There were many times when she thought to herself, I love my life, but they were all times when she was alone and wrapped inside her writing, or reading, or out on a long sumptuous walk in Central Park. She had grown to respect and learn from solitude, something she’d had little of in the past. Another good thing was that she’d become closer to her son. In the past she’d felt like a supporting actress to her husband’s incessant starring role. Now when the boy came home it was easy, like having a great roommate. He cooked sometimes, or at least set the table and did the dishes. They talked about everything, except the boy’s father. She knew they were still close, but the boy seemed to understand the competition between his parents. He’d made the mother feel as though he was on her side without ever really taking sides. She pictured her husband’s life out there amid Starbucks and Microsoft. He was working now for a software company in new product development. He had stock shares. He had a kayak and a mountain bike. He was fifty, and he still looked thirty-five. She was forty-five and looked it. She imagined her husband with a younger woman. And when she pressed the boy after his visit west for Thanksgiving, he affirmed there was someone younger who the father was occasionally seeing. Someone thirty.
Friday night they went out to a movie together, a black comedy her son had been talking about for days, and afterward they walked the fifteen blocks home. The boy had laughed throughout, but now she was dissecting the story, explaining how it could have been better. She was pointing out inconsistencies in the plot, and funny parts she’d found more depressing than funny, until she saw that she was essentially ruining his experience of it.
“I guess it did kind of suck,” he said.
“Don’t you ever just go to a movie to enjoy it?” her husband asked, when he called that night. This had been a favorite argument of theirs.
“Sure,” she said. “But I don’t enjoy crap. I wish I did. I’m tired of disliking things.”
As she went to sleep that night she heard her son slipping out. Without thinking of what she was doing, she threw on her long coat and boots and followed him, her nightgown underneath. The night was cold and mostly empty. A homeless man slept at the door of a dry cleaner’s. A few bankers or lawyers scuttled home for a few hours’ sleep; others, ties loosened, were out having late drinks around window tables of the neighborhood eateries. Most of the stores were decorated for Christmas with lights and Santas; the Gap had a reindeer in a down vest. A thin man with small wire-rimmed glasses waited while his dog watered a bare tree. The boy walked by the restaurant and picked up the hostess. When she walked out the door, they rounded a corner and kissed hungrily, illicitly, like adulterers in a bad movie when they’ve sneaked from the dinner party into the kitchen. Having seen him in love before, and sweetly, it was odd and depressing to see him this way: as a man with an impersonal libido.
He talked animatedly to her as they walked. About what? the mother wondered, and then she realized he was describing a scene from the movie they’d been to. He stopped in the middle of the block to finish, the streetlight above him casting his gestures in long, graceful shadows. The action sounded so much more compelling in his words than it had been on the screen; he had in fact added details and lines of dialogue that improved it. He was similar to his father in that way. Anything that happened sounded better coming from her son. It occurred to the mother that he was better suited for enjoying the world than she was. The boy laughed and the hostess just watched him. She kissed him seductively, her hands running from his chest to his shoulders. And then she did something that made the mother queasy. She ran her hand between his legs. It happened so fast the mother wasn’t sure she hadn’t rubbed his thigh or grasped for something in his front pocket.
“Helloo,” the hostess said.
He’s a college sophomore, the mother wanted to say. He still plays knock-hockey with his friends who come over, still collects rare stamps.
They went and had a drink at a nearby tavern. The mother watched through a window as the boy ordered drinks at the bar and brought them back to the table. It had gotten colder out, the wind had hardened, and the mother thought briefly of returning home. She was driven by curiosity, or perhaps by the impulse that causes some people to watch cars crash into each other, or fires overtake homes. At the same time she felt protective of the son she’d raised. She supposed fathers went through this all the time with their daughters — the sudden and alarming realization that their offspring had become eye candy for the masses, not simply for the right boys, who would be scrutinized and carefully selected. The hostess leaned ahead, resting her assets on the table before her. She was making girlish facial expressions, attempting to present herself as his age, which she definitely wasn’t. She wasn’t old. She was between their ages. The same age, the mother thought, as the woman who dated the boy’s father. She imagined the two of them in Seattle after the boy graduated, double-dating roommates, sisters perhaps, who would argue when they were together in the women’s room who would get Dad and who’d sleep with Junior.