Lunar Park

“Why are you going to try, Bret?” Jayne asked, standing over me. “You’re gonna try because your life is so much worse by yourself? Because you’re too afraid to live it alone? Don’t tell me you’re gonna try because you love Robby. Or because you love me. Or Sarah. You are far too selfish to get away with fucking lying like that. You’re just afraid to be by yourself. It’s just easier for you to stick around.”

“Then kick me out!” I suddenly roared back.

Jayne collapsed into the armchair and started sobbing again.

This caused me to regain my composure.

“It is a process, Jayne,” I said, my voice lowered. “It’s not intuitive. It’s something you learn—”

“No, Bret, it’s something you feel. You don’t learn how to connect with your own son from a fucking manual.”

“Two people have to try,” I said, leaning forward. “And Robby is not trying.”

“He’s a child—”

“He’s a lot smarter than you give him credit for, Jayne.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Yeah, right, it’s all me,” I said, giving up. “I’ve betrayed everyone.”

“You’re so sentimental,” she said, grimacing.

“Jayne, you took me back for your own selfish reasons. You didn’t take me back because of Robby.”

Her mouth dropped open in shock.

I was shaking my head, glaring at her.

“You took me back for yourself. Because you wanted me back. You always wanted me back. And you can’t stand that that’s how you feel. I came back to you because you wanted me back and this choice had very little to do with Robby. It was what Jayne wanted.”

“How can you say that?” Jayne sobbed, her voice high and questioning.

“Because I don’t think Robby wants me here. I don’t think Robby ever wanted me back.” I became so tired when I admitted this to the room that my voice became a whisper. “I don’t think the father ever needs to be there.” My eyes were watery again. “People are better off without them.”

Jayne stopped crying and regarded me with a cold and genuine interest. “Really? You think people are better off without a father?”

“Yes.” The room could barely hear me. “I do.”

“I think we can disprove that theory right now.”

“How? How, Jayne?”

Quietly, and with no effort, she simply said, “Look how you turned out.”

I knew she was right, but I couldn’t stand the silence that would have punctuated that sentence, the silence that would give it dimension and depth and weight, transforming it into the sentence that would connect with an audience.

“What does that mean?”

“That you’re wrong. That a boy needs his father. It means that you were wrong, Bret.”

“No, Jayne, you were wrong. It was wrong of you to have that child in the first place,” I said, meeting her gaze. “And you knew it was wrong. It wasn’t planned, and when you supposedly consulted me I told you that I didn’t want a child and then you went ahead and had him even though you knew it was wrong. We did not make that decision together. If anyone is wrong here, Jayne, it’s you —”

“You’re a walking pharmacy—you don’t even know what you’re talking about.” Jayne was sobbing again. “How can anyone listen to this?”

I thought I had reached a threshold of caring, but exhaustion kept me pushing forward in a rational tone.

“You did a very selfish thing by having Robby, and now you’re understanding just how selfish it was and so you blame me for that selfishness.”

“You fucking asshole,” she sobbed, wrecked. “You are such an asshole.”

“Jayne,” Dr. Faheida interrupted. “We talked about how you should ignore Bret when he says something you disagree with or know to be patently false.”

“Hey!” I exclaimed, sitting up.

“Oh, I try,” Jayne said, breathing in, her face twisted with regret. “But he won’t let me ignore him. Because Mr. Rock Star needs all the attention and he can’t give it to anyone else.” She choked back another sob, and then she directed her fury at me again. “You can’t step back from any situation and see it from any perspective but your own. You are the one, Bret, who is completely selfish and self-absorbed and—”

“Whenever I try to give you or the kids the attention you all say you need, all you guys do is back away from me, Jayne. Why should I even try anymore?”

“Stop whining!” she screamed.

“Jayne—” Dr. Faheida jumped in.

“Robby was fucked up before I got here, Jayne,” I said quietly. “And it wasn’t because of me.”

“He’s not fucked up, Bret.” She started coughing. She reached for a Kleenex. “Is this really all you’ve learned?”

“Whatever I’ve learned in the last four months is that the hostility directed toward me in that house has alienated me from connecting with anybody. That is what I have learned, Jayne, and . . .”

I stopped. Suddenly I couldn’t keep it up. I involuntarily softened. I began weeping. How had I ended up so alone? I wanted everything to be rewound. Immediately I got up from the armchair and knelt in front of Jayne, my head bowed down. She tried pushing me away but I held her arms firmly. And I started to make promises. I spoke uninterrupted, my voice raw. I told her that I was going to be there for him and that things were changing and that I’d realized over the last week that I have to be there for him and that it was time for me to be the father. I had never spoken these words with such force and in that moment I made a decision to let the tide of narrative take me where it wanted to, which I believed at the time was toward Robby, and I kept talking while I wept. I was going to concentrate only on our family now. It was the only thing that meant anything to me. And when I was finished and finally looked up into Jayne’s face it was fractured, distorted, and then something passed between us that was distinct and clear, and in the most dreamlike way, her head slowly tilted, and in that movement I felt something ascend and then her face composed itself as she stared back at me and her tears stopped along with mine, and this new expression was in such a contrast to the harshness that had scattered it before that a stillness overtook the room, transporting it to someplace else. She had been paralyzed, transfixed, by my admission. I remained kneeling, our hands still curled together. We were drawing each other inward. It was a faint movement toward countervision, toward comfort. It felt as if I had crossed a world to arrive at this point. Something unclenched in me, and her remorseful gaze suggested a future. But—and I tried to block this thought—were we really looking at each other, or were we looking at who we wanted to be?

18. spago

A Spago had appeared off Main Street last April, almost twenty years to the day after the original had opened above Sunset Boulevard in L.A., and where I first took Blair in the cream-colored 450 SL after an Elvis Costello concert at the Greek Theatre, and at a window table overlooking the city I told her that I’d been accepted by Camden and that I was leaving for New Hampshire at the end of August and she fell silent for the rest of dinner. (Blair, a girl from Laurel Canyon, had actually quoted Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” on her senior page in the Buckley yearbook, which made me silently cringe at the time, but now, twenty years later, the couplet she chose moved me to tears.) When Jayne and I entered the restaurant it was already half-empty. We were seated at a window table and our waiter had shiny hair and was midway through reciting the specials when he recognized Jayne, at which point his drone became falsely chipper, his timidity activated by her presence. I noticed this. Jayne did not, because she was staring at me sadly, and her expression didn’t change when I ordered a Stoli and grapefruit juice. She accepted this and ordered a glass of the house Viognier. We touched hands across the table. Her eyes wandered away and out the window; it was cold and Main Street’s storefronts were darkened and a traffic light swung above an empty intersection, flashing a yellow light. We were both less stern. We’d become simplified, anchored, nothing was shifting or panicked here between the two of us, and we wanted to be tender with each