oversized bowler hat, Ned scrawny and big-footed in sandals at the beach. I had personally packed a carton of his iron cars and lead soldiers into the attic. Still, I’d never fully apprehended it. This man here was what grew from a boy. He had been twenty-six and I seventeen when we met; by my lights he’d been middle-aged even then. He might have been born an adult. Those pictures and toys might have been the artifacts of a boy who had died young, the former inhabitant of an old house who took his sense of limitless possibility out of the world with him when he went. What remained was china stored behind glass and the patience of African violets—an unhurried elderly life. But now, as if for the first time, lying beside Ned, I could see the boyish crook of his elbow under the pillow, the young muscles of a chest gone hairy and slack. Poor thing, I thought. Poor boy.
I reached over to stroke his shoulder. I might have kissed him. I might have let my hand stray down to the lush tangle of his chest. But my new sense of his innocent beauty was still too delicate. If he awoke and kissed me hard, if he mauled my ribs, it might collapse altogether. So I contented myself with watching him, and petting the soft, furred mound of his shoulder.
BOBBY
MY FATHER has bought himself a new pair of glasses—aviator style, with spindly pink- gold rims. He comes to my bedroom door and poses there, one elbow crooked jauntily against the frame.
“Bobby, what do you think?” he asks.
“Huh?” I say. I’ve been lying in the dark with the headphones on, smoking a joint and listening to Jethro Tull. The music has scooped out my thoughts and I need a few minutes to reenter the world of cause and effect.
“Bobby, what do you think?” he asks again.
“I don’t know,” I answer eventually. He will have to give me more time with the question.
My father points to his head. He is standing in light. Hundred-watt rays stream around him, cut through the dusk of my room.
What do I think of his head? It is in fact an expansive question, probably beyond my scope.
“Well,” I say. I let the syllable hang.
“My glasses,” he says. “Bobby, I got new glasses today.”
A stitch of time passes. He says, “What do you think? Are they a little young for me?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I can hear how foolish I sound; how empty. But I am helpless before his questions. He might as well be an angel, posing riddles.
He sighs, a slow punctured hissing sound. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll start dinner.”
“Good, Dad,” I say, in a voice I hope comes out cheerful and cooperative. I check with myself—is it his night or mine to make dinner? This is Tuesday. His. I have got that right.
Only after he’s removed his shape from the doorway do I realize his questions were simple ones. He’s traded in his tortoiseshells for a racier model, and wants reassurance. I should follow him to the kitchen, start the conversation over. But I don’t do that. I collapse under the weight of my own self-interest, and permit myself a return to the music and the dark.
Sometime later, my father calls me to dinner. He has made chopped steak and squares of frozen hash browns. He sips Scotch from a glass decorated with pictures of orange slices round and evenly spoked as wagon wheels.
We eat for a while without talking. Once they’ve established themselves, our silences are hard to break. They are tough and seamless as shrink-wrap. Finally I say, “Those glasses look okay. I mean, I like them.”
“I think they’re probably a bit too young,” he says. “I suspect a man my age probably looks a little foolish in glasses like these.”
“Naw. All kinds of people wear that kind. They look fine.”
“Do you honestly think so?”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Well,” he says. “I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to have a younger person’s opinion on the subject.”
“They do. They look, you know, real nice.”
“Good.”
Silverware clicks against the plates. I can hear the action of my father’s throat, swallowing.
For weeks now, he has been dyeing his hair. He is on a strand-by-strand agenda—every few days, he dyes a few more. In this way he hopes to present the change as natural, as if time had reversed itself against his personal will.
This is his solution—to age in big-collared shirts and leather vests, to try every combination of mustache, beard, and sideburns. I’ve seen him in the old courtship pictures, big-armed in T-shirts, a meandering, hard-drinking musician who bumped up against the limits of his own talent and fell in love with a farm woman, a widow who knew about seeds and harvest.
Then I remember. It comes to me: today is the anniversary. It is two years ago today.
He replenishes his drink from the Ballantine bottle and says, “Let me ask you another question.”
“Okay.”
“What would you think about a new car?”
“I don’t know,” I answer. “Isn’t the one we’ve got okay?”
He sets his drink down hard enough to splash Scotch and a thumbnail-sized ice cube on the tabletop. “You’re right,” he says. “You’re absolutely right. There is absolutely no need for change of any kind. I couldn’t agree more.”
The grandfather clock ticks. I say, “A new car would be okay, Dad.”
“I was just thinking about something a little snazzier,” he says. “Perhaps a foreign model, with a sunroof.”
“Uh-huh. Good.”
“Something that would let a little air in.”
“Yeah.”
We work our way through dinner. My father’s face is remote and optimistic as he eats. He is taking the gray out, hair by hair. His eyes swim behind the oval lenses of his new glasses.
She left by slow degrees before making it official. She lived in the guest room, made rare silent appearances in a pale turquoise robe. Once, when she passed me in the hall on her way to the bathroom, she stopped long enough to stroke my hair. She didn’t speak. She looked at me as if she was standing on a platform in a flat, dry country and I was pulling away on a train that traveled high into an alpine world.
After my father and I found her he made the calls and we sat together, he and I, in the empty living room. We left her alone—it seemed like the polite thing to do. We sat quietly, waiting for the police and the paramedics to arrive. We didn’t speak.
In the dining room, the autumn farm scene hasn’t changed. Cows still cast orange shadows, trees still sprout yellow leaves. My father nibbles demurely at his steak, doesn’t touch the square potatoes. I finish my dinner, take my plate to the kitchen and add it to the pile. An enormous fly, iridescent, roams ecstatically over a quarter moon of yellowed lamb fat. The curtains still sport blue teapots.
Later, after my father has gone to bed, I get up and walk around. I took a hit of Dexedrine after school, thinking I might clean up the house, but I fell into music instead. Two joints haven’t dulled the speed enough to allow anything like sleep, so once my father has killed the bottle and settled into bed, I take a walk through the rooms, my head crackling and blazing like a light bulb. Under the gathering disorder is a perfect replica of a house, like the period reproductions they put together in small-town museums. Here is their living room, a cherry-red sofa once considered brash, and an old copper washtub, where logs would be kept if fires were built in the hearth. Here is the front door, yellow oak with a single frosted-glass window through which strangers can be seen but not identified. And here is the rumpus room, paneled, with a rag rug like a bull’s-eye on the brown linoleum floor.
After the accident, my father tried to sell the house. But in six months the single interested party offered slightly more than half the market value. This section of Cleveland was not a growth proposition.
Music plays inside my head. I walk down the hall to my father’s door. My head is an illuminated radio—for a moment I believe the music will wake him up. I stand in front of his door, watching the grain of the wood. I open
