“And for you?” the attendant said then. He was tanned, with dark hair combed drastically to one side and pale blue eyes that seemed to boast about the rest of his face.
“A bottle of the Private Reserve.” Alexi calculated, after the motel room and the filling station snacks and the raspberries, bread and cheese, that he had a little less than seven dollars left, and he was willing to drop it all on that bottle. He turned to Benny. “I don’t care what it costs. Nothing in the world,” he said, “is better than a glass of this with that Camembert.”
“Agreed,” the attendant said. “Absolutely. That will be ten dollars.”
Alexi swallowed. The wallet in his hand, his black leather Ferragamo wallet, suddenly felt flimsy, meaningless, another stupid prop in his ridiculous sham of a life. This was, he thought, a thousand times worse than the previous night at the Pinecone, simply because his son was seeing it. He had a sudden, massive fear that this was what every subsequent day would be, a slightly variant, though eerily similar, round of humiliation.
He surveyed the tasting room. His first thought was that he had no idea Stella and Jack were that wealthy, carrying that wine out by the caseload. His second thought was that no one, not a single person, recognized him — and they never would. The attendant didn’t know he was waiting on a man who couldn’t afford that bottle, who could hardly afford the free samples. He smiled patiently at Alexi. He grinned down at the boy. Benny was looking back and forth at Alexi and the attendant, and then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the five-dollar bill his mother had given him. He laid it on the counter. Alexi stared at the bill. He wondered if there was anything more excruciating for a child than watching his father shamed. “Put that away,” he whispered, and when Benny didn’t, when he just stood there, Alexi snatched it off the counter. He shoved it into Benny’s pocket and led him toward the door. He could feel the attendant staring. Only this time, unlike the night before, he couldn’t come up with a single excuse for why he was bolting back to the parking lot.
He got into the driver’s side and covered his face with his hands. Benny slid in next to him and Alexi knew, suddenly, that he was going to cry. The first time he ever had in front of his son — the first time, since he was a boy, that he had in front of anyone. Benny tentatively put a hand on his arm.
“That’s a good wine,” Alexi said, wiping his eyes.
“I know,” the boy said.
“I promise you, we’ll share a bottle one day.”
“It’s okay,” Benny said. “I don’t even like wine.”
“Of course you don’t,” Alexi said. “You’re nine years old.”
“Actually,” the boy said, “I’m ten. I had a birthday in April.”
“My son is ten.” He stared out at the windshield, tiny dead bugs splattered on the glass. Beyond that was grass and water and more grass, everything beautiful and still as a photograph.
“The thing is,” Alexi said, “you asked me a question last night and I didn’t give you a straight answer.”
“That’s alright,” Benny said quietly. He picked at a mosquito bite on his arm, flinging the scab in the air. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked.”
“No,” Alexi said. “I want to be the kind of dad you can say anything to. That’s something I thought a lot about this year. It’s just hard for me to talk about.”
“Yeah?” Benny said, looking excited.
“Not in the way you think,” Alexi said. “I didn’t get in any fistfights, no one knifed me in the leg. If anything, life inside was quiet. Most people had done their craziness out in the world and were pretty beaten down by the time they came in.”
He shifted in his seat. “But something happened to me in there. I had a lot of time on my hands and so I finally started paying attention to the news.” The world, it turned out, was falling apart. Every day, he told Benny, new things came up about Russia. They’d all get together, Alexi and his buddy Karl and a few others, over dinner or cards or sometimes during shifts in the garage, and discuss it all. They weren’t so naïve they believed the Soviet Union would be perfect, but in those meetings at Stella and Jack’s they had talked about how it stood for a better way of life. And yet suddenly Alexi was hearing about the treason trials, how even the supposedly staunchest communists in Russia were turning out to be traitors. It was the most depressing feeling, sitting in the prison yard with all these believers, discussing plans to fix the world while it was burning up around them. Sitting around with all these people who, unlike Alexi, had genuinely devoted themselves to the Soviet model. All these people who had destroyed their careers and their families for an ideology that may, in the end, not have worked at all. “That may have been making life worse for all the common people in Russia everybody was always talking about,” he said. “Just like my parents had told me all along.”
Alexi’s tears were coming so quickly that every time he wiped his eyes a new batch was waiting. He had no idea if any of this made sense to the boy. If Benny was old enough to understand even a fraction of it, if all any of it meant to him was that his father hadn’t been around. That he’d missed science fairs and parent-teacher conferences and — Alexi wasn’t even sure what he’d missed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You must think your dad’s gone crazy.”
“No,” Benny said. “I get it. At least I think I do.” And then Alexi saw something in his son’s face, an expression of pure, unbridled adoration, and he thought about how much he would have killed for a moment like this with his own father. It was all so unfair, he thought. Fatherhood was like one giant free pass. The crying, the rambling, the admissions of weakness: all of it seemed to be making his son admire him more, and when Katherine broke down and did the same thing — the exact same thing — it made Benny want to run from her. He hated himself right then. Benny was the only person he had left, and Alexi didn’t trust himself not to set this relationship on fire along with all the others. He thought about his friend’s pool house awaiting him in L.A., where he’d begin to grovel for work he didn’t even want, now that he could no longer return to the studio, now that all his contacts were still in jail, or hiding out in Mexico, or God knows where.
Alexi had convinced himself all that mattered was that he be near his family. But now even the smallest decisions felt enormous, insurmountable, potentially destructive — and for the first time, it occurred to him that this weekend could be causing Benny even more damage than the past year when he had no father around at all.
He put his keys in the ignition. Alexi suddenly wanted to drive very fast, as far away from himself as possible. “Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
“Back to San Francisco.” He’d punished his son so much already. Benny shouldn’t be forced to contend, on top of everything else, with the full reality of the disgraced man his father had become. It would devastate him. “I’ll drop you with your mother and Aunt Ellen.”