Then Benny spit, looked up and said, “I wanted to visit you this year.”
“I know you did,” Alexi said, slowly. “And I really wanted to see you. This thing with your mother and me — it’s complicated.”
“I know,” Benny said. He walked back into the room, where he stripped down to his underpants and climbed into bed.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Alexi said, wanting very much not to talk about it.
“That’s okay. It’s kind of nice having a break from her, you know?”
Benny looked somewhere past him, at the wooden nightstands, the brass lamp, finally settling on the desert landscape on the wall, cacti and brown hills and a moon too pocked and orange to be taken seriously. He seemed exhausted. “From it. From the whole thing. That’s what I meant.” He pulled the covers to his neck and closed his eyes. “You know any good stories?”
“Sure.” Alexi was touched by the question. “About what?”
“About jail?”
Alexi stood in the doorway of the bathroom, watching his son. He was so tiny in that twin bed. He thought about Katherine, somewhere in the city, peering out her sister’s window to make sure she hadn’t been followed. He had not only ruined much of her life, he thought; he had passed on the horrible flu of panic to the one person he’d believed was immune. “There isn’t much to say,” he said, finally. “You don’t do a lot in there.”
“But what’s it like?” Benny said.
“It’s not a good place.”
“But—”
“It’s a place you never want to end up, understand?” That was the way his own father used to talk to him, shutting down a conversation before it had a chance to happen, like watching a storefront’s metal grate slide down right in front of him, one of those shop owners who randomly closed up whenever they felt like it, even when customers were waiting outside. Alexi could have been five, ten, fifteen — it didn’t matter, it was always the same. Always the feeling that every question he asked his father, even something as innocuous as whether he should set the table, was an intrusion and a burden. That Alexi’s presence alone exhausted the man, made him breathe deep as though he were trying hard not to snap. Which of course made Alexi ham it up more, anything for his attention. He had such a clear image of coming home from school and attempting to regale his father with some anecdote about his teacher. Desperately attempting to fatten it into a full-fledged story, impersonating classmates the man might have found more interesting than his son (was that when the performing had started, Alexi wondered, back in that small, bright kitchen in Queens?) while his father closed his eyes and grimaced, as if doing everything in his power to stop his patience from reaching its end, and Alexi wondered now why he couldn’t do things differently. Not just to stand in the doorway ruminating about it, but to actually walk across the room and sit beside his son.
So he did it. He perched on the edge of the bed, the green motel sign reflecting off Benny’s toothpick arms. But the boy was asleep (to be nine again, Alexi thought, dreaming before your head hit the pillow), his breath low and even, his knees tucked to his chest and his arms around them, as if, even with the bed all to himself, he was still carving out the space where his mother usually crawled in beside him.
ALEXI HAD never believed that saying about everything improving with a new day. Usually the moment he awoke, before even opening his eyes, he was well aware of all that was wrong in his life. But the following morning was optimistically sunny, and even breakfast at a nearby diner wasn’t half bad, a fruit cup, eggs, free refills on the coffee and toast with three different kinds of jelly. A breeze hit him as they walked back to the car, that perfect California weather Alexi hadn’t realized he’d missed until right then, when he was so comfortable he forgot about the temperature completely.
“So listen,” he said to Benny, pulling out of the lot. “No filling station junk today. I say we hit up a few vineyards, have a picnic lunch somewhere special.” In the daylight, even the thoroughfare was quite pretty. Vineyards combed out on either side of him, and beyond, cows ambled across bright yellow fields. They both, at the same time, rolled down their windows, and all that balmy air filled the car.
Alexi found a jazz station and for about an hour they drove around. They stopped at a cheese shop for the best picnic food he could find: a hunk of Camembert, a Bûchette de Banon and a baguette. Down another road he pulled over at a farm stand and bought a carton of raspberries. He didn’t bother to wash them and he and Benny ate as they drove, licking their lips and wiping their hands on their pants and giggling. Alexi was feeling giddy. He was feeling like a kid again, being with his kid, and as they coasted through the hills, he felt something opening inside him, a tranquillity he hadn’t known was there. This was what it felt like to drive around with your son on a warm day, he thought. He put an arm around Benny’s shoulder and his son immediately leaned into him, all his weight against Alexi’s chest.
Up ahead was a Mediterranean-style winery, white stucco with iron gates and bougainvillea trailing the walls and the terra-cotta steps. The gardens on either side of the long, sloping driveway were so impeccably groomed that Alexi felt a little guilty sullying the lot with the Plymouth. Gazebos dotted the property, and in the center of the grounds was a pond where Alexi could see, darting beneath the water, Japanese koi that he suspected cost more than Katherine’s monthly rent in Palms.
Inside the tasting room, wooden barrels were scattered about with cheese and cracker samples; Alexi was proud when he saw his son take only one, using the little square napkin to collect the crumbs, without him having to say so. He would tell Katherine, he decided, that he noticed the good manners she was instilling in their son. It might be a good excuse to call her.
Behind the counter, an attendant was waiting on an older couple, silver-haired and so alike in their navy sweaters that Alexi couldn’t tell whether they were siblings or had simply been married for so long they’d begun to resemble one another. He took a moment to survey the wine. An entire shelf of Bordeaux blends, and there, nestled between two Barbeitos, the pièce de résistance, the crowning glory, the 1936 Georges de Latour Private Reserve. He was filled with a rush of memory: Stella and Jack had introduced him to it back when Alexi was a hack, a novice with an unsophisticated palate, not knowing the difference, even, between a Viognier and a Riesling. Of all his friends, those two had always been ahead of the curve on everything, and Alexi had a flash of their trip together, picnicking on grounds as lovely as these, then driving a couple cases back to L.A. in time for an NAACP benefit they were throwing at their place in Hancock Park. Alexi saw himself standing by their pool with a glass in his hand, surrounded by people, all of whom wanted to be near him. He couldn’t remember the story he’d been telling but remembered people laughing and himself laughing along with them, certain that night it would be impossible to embarrass himself no matter how drunk he got — so different from his first industry parties, when he was starting out and never even completely sure whether his invite had been a mistake, every conversation a cause for second-guessing, so afraid he’d say one wrong thing and immediately be outed as a false ally, a false European, a false Alexi.
But there, at Stella and Jack’s, he’d felt his life commencing. There people laughed at his jokes, even if they weren’t funny, though somehow, when he was feeling that good, when he was riding that high, they almost always were. Every story he told seemed to have an arc, a punch line, an effortless, self-deprecating beauty — and he suddenly remembered the tale he’d been telling that night by the pool, about his grandmother’s run-in with the NKVD outside her apartment, a story he’d only heard secondhand from his parents, as he’d left Moscow as a baby, but into which Alexi had found, easily enough, a way to insert himself as a character, the young grandson in the doorway with his Babchi, listening to the old woman shout those officers into silence for lurking outside, then inviting them in for coffee and dessert.