“Of course. Of course I do. I’m her father. I’m one of her fathers.”
I shook my head. “Maybe I don’t quite get it,” I said.
“What’s to get? You’ve been there, you’ve seen us all together. We’re three people who have a baby. What’s the big deal?”
“No big deal,” I said. “I guess I’m just old-fashioned.”
“You’re not old-fashioned. Not with a haircut like that.”
“Well, all right. I worry that you’re being exploited in all this. Bobby and Clare have each other. What have you got?”
This was delicate ground. We’d never formally acknowledged his proclivities—other than Bobby, I’d never met a liaison of his. As far as I knew, he didn’t have them. And here’s the awful truth: I preferred it that way. If he’d insisted on it, I’d have tried to accommodate a mental image of my son engaged in sexual acts with other men. But he wasn’t prone to insistence. He paid his visits in the guise of a chaste bachelor, and his father and I had always been willing to receive him as such. If life was failing to mark him in some way, I suppose we must have played our part.
“We’ve all got each other,” he said. “Mom, you’re right. You’re not getting it. Maybe we should talk about something else.”
“If you like. Just tell me this. You’re happy doing what you’re doing?”
“Yes. I’m ecstatic. And I’m part of something. I’m part of a family and a business. We’re building a home together. You get too caught up in the fact that we don’t look exactly like an ordinary family.”
“All right. I’ll try not to get too caught up in that.”
And, after a moment, we moved on to other subjects. I could have responded to confessions of unorthodox love, if he’d chosen to make them. But I could not demand such candor. I simply couldn’t. It would be his move to make.
I didn’t get around to my own business until the night before his departure. We had eaten in—I’d made a simple avocado vinaigrette and done salmon steaks on the grill. After the plates were cleared away I started coffee and said, “Jonathan, dear, there’s a reason I asked you to come this time. There’s something I want to give you.”
His eyes quickened—he must have thought I had a family treasure put away for him. For a moment I could see him perfectly at the age of four, precociously well mannered but beside himself with greed in a toy store, where no acquisition was too lavish to lie beyond imagining.
“What is it?” he asked, his eagerness politely concealed.
I sighed. If I’d had a quilt or a gold watch I’d have given it to him instead, but neither Ned nor I had ever saved things like that. We both came from families more interested in the future than in the past. I went upstairs to the bedroom without speaking, got the box out of my dresser and brought it down.
He knew what it was. “Oh, Mom,” he said.
I set it gently on the table, a smooth wooden rectangle with a brass plaque that bore Ned’s full name and his dates. “It’s time for you to take charge of this,” I said. “That was your father’s one request. That you decide about disposal.”
He nodded. He looked at the box but did not touch it. “I know,” he said. “He told me.”
“Have you been thinking about it?” I asked.
“Sure. Sure I have. Mom, that’s part of why I’m doing what I’m doing. I’m trying to make some kind of home.”
“I see.” I sat down beside him. We both watched the box as if we suspected it might move on its own.
“Have you looked inside?” he asked.
“Yes. At first I thought I couldn’t stand to. Then as time passed I realized I couldn’t stand not to.”
“And?”
“It’s sooty. Yellowish-gray. There’s more than you’d think. I’d imagined just a handful, something talcumy you could toss into the wind with one hand. But it’s not like that, there’s quite a lot. There are some little slivers of bone, dark, like old ivory. Honey, I can tell you this—it’s no more of your father than a pair of his old shoes would be. Do you want to look?”
“No. Not right now.”
“All right.”
“Why are you giving this to me now?” he asked. “I mean, well, exactly that. Why now?”
I hesitated. Here was the truth: I had started seeing someone. He was younger than I, his name was Paul Martinez, and he’d begun teaching me a range of pleasures I had hardly imagined while married to Ned.
It seemed I was living my life in reverse. With Ned I had had order and sanctuary, the serenity one hopes for in old age. Now, at the onset of my true old age, I seemed to be falling in love with an argumentative dark-skinned man who played the guitar and kissed me in spots Ned had hesitated even to call by their names. I felt wrong about having his ashes in the house now.
But all I said to Jonathan was “I’m afraid I’m turning into Morticia Addams, with my husband’s ashes on the mantelpiece. I shouldn’t have kept them this long.”
There would be time to tell about Paul, if the attraction caught and held. Although his attentions thrilled me, I didn’t trust them yet—there were so many reasons for a younger man to fleetingly believe he loved an older woman. Why upset Jonathan needlessly? I’d wait and see whether this affair was serious enough to merit upsetting him.
“I can understand that,” he said. “I can’t quite believe these are his real ashes here. It seems so…It doesn’t seem like something that would happen in the twentieth century. For a private citizen to just have his father’s ashes in a box.”
“Do you want to take them out to the desert together?” I said. “We could go right now.”
“Here? You mean take them out and scatter them behind the house?”
“Yes. Now listen. This isn’t the life your father and I dreamed about. It wasn’t our fantasies come true. Hardly. But it’s where we ended up, and we weren’t unhappy here. To tell you the truth, I’ve been very happy.”
“He told me not to bury him in the desert. He told me that explicitly. He wanted me to settle down, and bury him wherever I made a home.”
“Jonathan, honey. Don’t you think there’s something a little…
He fluttered his eyes in mock astonishment. “Mother,” he said. “Are you telling me to get hip?”
“I’m telling you to stop worrying so much,” I said. “Your father’s dead. He was concerned about your rootlessness because he couldn’t imagine anyone being happy if he wasn’t tied down. That was his nature. But it would be a shame to let your father’s lack of imagination curb your own life. Especially from beyond the grave.”
He nodded. After a moment’s hesitation, he put out his hands and touched the box. He ran his fingertips lightly over the engraved letters on the plaque. Without looking up he said, “Mom, if anything happened to me —”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” I said quickly.
“But if something did.”
I sucked in a breath, and looked at him. Here was the real reason I’d lived unquestioningly with my image of Jonathan’s simple bachelorhood, his sexual disenfranchisement. I knew I could get a call someday, from Bobby or Clare or from someone I’d never met, giving me the name of a hospital.
“All right,” I said. “If something did.”
“If something did, if you got stuck with both Dad and me, I don’t want you scattering our ashes in this desert. It gives me the creeps. Okay?”
I didn’t speak. I got up and poured coffee.
“Do you want to take them back and scatter them in Woodstock?” I asked as I set down the steaming mugs.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
“It’s up to you,” I said. “This is strictly your decision.”
“I know. I’ll find a place. Do you want to go to the movies?”
