I still had not told Damon I had met his brother. He was about to meet my parents, and he had no idea I had already met a member of his family. I felt bad, but also felt it was important to keep it a secret, for now. I wanted him to be as calm and relaxed as possible for the meeting. Once we had crossed that threshold successfully, I could be open.
Right before ringing my parents’ doorbell, Damon and I were still wresting with the buttons on his green shirt. Finally, he got me to let him keep more than the top two buttons open; I got him to keep less than the top four buttons open.
My parents were innocent and pure in their expectations, unsuspicious. They were ready, willing, and hopeful to have nothing but the highest opinion of my boyfriend. And it began well. They seemed pleased immediately. Their smiles, already broad when they opened the door, broadened when they got their first glimpse of Damon.
He made a good impression in opaque clothing, despite showing a lot of chest; he was attractive. They took his coat, which of course he was not wearing, but carrying. My father extended his hand toward Damon’s gloved hand, to remind him to take off the glove. I noticed this just in time.
“Andy has a birth defect,” I said. Damon and I had decided that Andy would be his new name for my parents, and we had practiced using it, to prevent blunders. “The skin on his left hand is fragile, and can’t be exposed to daylight or hard angles. It has to be constantly protected by that glove, because if it gets injured, which happens very easily, it doesn’t heal by itself: it has to be taken care of by a doctor.”
I estimated that this was more than enough information to assure that my parents would leave his hand alone. And sure enough, they politely ignored his hand. But not for more than five minutes — at least not my father. He said to Damon, “You know, I’m a hemophiliac.”
Damon nodded and uttered a little “Oh.”
“Are you one too?”
“Not exactly.”
I begged my father to shut up. My mother seconded me. So he did.
We had drinks. My father updated me on the lack of progress the police were making in capturing my kidnapper. He turned to Damon:
“Isn’t it terrible what happened to Anna? I don’t know if she’s told you all the details — I assume she has. For someone to do to another human being what this man, this Damon, did to her, he must be a deranged monster, don’t you think, Andy? Don’t you think it’s the most abominable thing, what he did to her?”
Damon replied, “Anna hasn’t told me much about it, but she did tell me it was horrible. Despite the success she’s achieved in her career she doesn’t think it was worth it.”
“Of course she doesn’t think it was worth it! Do you think it was worth it?”
“Only Anna can decide that. And she did decide it wasn’t worth it. But I must say I have a vested interest in the issue. If Anna had not been kidnapped, she probably would not then have been at the cast party where I met her. So if you find me hesitant to condemn her kidnapper, it’s undoubtedly for that reason.”
My mother chuckled, charmed. My father looked uncertain as to how he felt about that.
In a misguided effort to win my father over, Damon said, “The kidnapper made a mistake in kidnapping Anna. It was poor judgment on his part, and he undoubtedly feels bad about it now, especially if he somehow knows that Anna feels it wasn’t worth it. Poor man. I pity him.” After being silent a moment, Damon added: “I suspect he was in love with Anna and wanted to make her dream come true.”
“Yes, exactly. There is no excuse for that,” said my father.
During dinner, my mother said, “Andy, what does your work consist of, exactly? I’m fascinated.”
“I build telescopes and detectors to see the sky in X ray. These optical systems are then sent out of the atmosphere to gather their information. Now I’m working on a European project called XMM, which stands for X-ray Multi-Mirror. It has three co-aligned telescopes, two of which will be equipped with reflection grating spectrometers. Those spectrometers are what I’m working on. It’s really a spectroscopic mission, rather than an imaging one. The imaging missions always bring back nice pictures and are good for P.R., but spectroscopy doesn’t excite the public much. Nevertheless, it is the spectroscopy that produces the most scientific breakthroughs. Usually black holes could only be identified spectroscopically, for example. Anyway, it’s really a big project involving scientists from many countries, and it’ll be launched in two years or so. Nothing like the small homemade experiments that I launched on sounding rockets in the past. Those were like bottle rockets by comparison.”
Damon seemed to greatly enjoy describing his fictitious job. He even added, “It’s a very sexy field.”
“It does sound sexy,” said my father.
“Sexy like fencing. The same kind of sexy,” said Damon.
My father nodded, and my mother dreamily said, “Yeah.”
As Damon continued describing his work animatedly, he became less careful with his gloved hand; he moved it naturally, as if it were not gloved, which was a big mistake. In allowing his hand to move so naturally, he was actually allowing it to look very unnaturaclass="underline" he didn’t notice that where the glove covered his absent index finger it remained, at all times, stiff and pointing. Damon and I had talked about this phenomenon and that he would have to be careful about it. But he was not being careful enough. To my distress, I noticed my father’s gaze rest upon the straight, frozen finger, and then, to my horror, I noticed that his eyes would not leave that finger. As soon as Damon noticed my father’s gaze, his other fingers froze as well. He stopped talking, drank, and desperately resumed his occupational explanations, trying to recapture my father’s interest: “I’m interested in observing the life cycle of stars and the gases that they’re made of. You see, stars form out of collapsing clouds in the galaxy.”
“Clouds of what?” asked my mother.
“Mostly hydrogen,” answered Damon, “and small amounts of other elements, like helium, carbon, oxygen, and dust. Often the cloud material is in molecular phase. When the clouds’ self-gravity exceeds their sustaining pressure, they tend to collapse, give off heat, and when they become dense enough, they begin to burn and turn into stars. The less dense parts of the clouds might be blown away by the stars’ radiation pressure.”
I couldn’t believe he was talking so much about clouds, a topic too close to his real occupation, which I had finally told my parents about, after my escape. I was sitting too far from him to kick him under the table, so I shook my head at him, mouthing the word cloud.
He immediately changed the topic: “I used to work at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, doing surface physics with Dr. Dennis Zilkha. There I spent months measuring surface reactions between oxygen and this wonder-alloy nickel aluminum. For a while there was a lot of interest in nickel aluminum. It’s light, has high-tensile strength, and is resistant to heat, so there were plenty of potential applications for it as a material.”
Damon had not succeeded in diverting my father’s attention from his finger for even a second, and now Damon was becoming distressed. How did this distress manifest itself? He unbuttoned a button on his shirt. My mother, who still had not noticed his pointing finger, did clearly notice the unbuttoning. My father, vice versa.
Damon shifted in his seat. He was suffocating subtly, and so discreetly. He lowered his ungloved hand under the table and was doing something there with it, and because I knew him, I knew that he was trying to take off his pants. It was tragic. His gloved hand remained in sight; I’m sure he was too afraid to move it, in case it broke the spell of paralysis that seemed to have befallen my father. Damon was still talking about experimental astrophysics, which didn’t work on my mother, who looked surprised and uncomfortable, but politely didn’t say so; and which was wasted on my father, who wasn’t about to notice any undressing, as long as the finger remained rigid. Consequently, Damon was being driven mad. As casually as he could, he pushed his shirt off one shoulder. His ungloved hand was back under the table and he was clearly trying to lower his pants, but he was having a hard time of it without getting up. Out of frustration, he yanked his shirt off his other shoulder, causing the fabric to stretch across his torso, where the next button, looking ready to pop off, was holding the two halves together. Both of his shoulders were now bare.