I’m a pacifist now, John said.
A wise indulgence, Albert said.
Better a pacifist than a coward, John said.
Wait until you have a family of your own. Then you’ll see what cowardice is, Albert said, forking steak into his mouth.
Albert Caldwell was not one to be caught in the tectonic meat grinder. He lived as though he’d created an extra dimension beyond time and space, one that enabled him to stand out from the dull grain of the city like a chess piece atop an empty board. Over time John recognized his father’s godliness as the true seat of their disagreement.
Fifteen years later, the father’s omniscience was as secure as ever. Whether John was buying apples or on an audition or in bed with a woman, his father was there, peering over his glasses, judging, praising, chastising, casting aspersions, opining on the quality of his son’s choices, from clothes to bus route to meal to mate. So present was the old man’s voice that John rarely had a thought that didn’t lead to an internal dialogue with his father.
John lit his pipe. He’d recognized the movie immediately. The French Connection. Has Hackman ever not worn a raincoat? Does he have some kind of contractual thing with London Fog? It’s a short man’s solution, of course, a way to elongate the torso, but in Hackman’s case it just looks like he’s a perv. No, wait. This isn’t The French Connection. It’s The Conversation. Oh hell. The only thing good about it is the first scene. The whole film’s a gimmick. A theory with a movie built around it. A movie made to convince everyone that the director is an artist, that’s what it is. A showpiece. There’s no story, and the whole premise is based on a misunderstanding. A cheap, stupid idea. John kept flexing his hand to irritate the skin over the knuckles, each one a fat baked ham about to split open.
He’d moved into a sublet after she left. Out of a misguided sense of hope that she’d return, he’d held on to the lease at their apartment, though he couldn’t bear to stay there anymore, not after what had happened. The sublet was a studio so claustrophobic that it might have been the cabin of a sailboat with a single hazy porthole at the bow. It was at the top of a set of comically narrow and crooked stairs, a dark, snaking flight of risers that could have been carved into sandstone in some prehistoric cliff dwelling. Climbing them predisposed him to the queasiness that overtook him when he was inside.
Even now it made him sick, a tapping at the back of his throat, when he pictured it, the crooked plywood cabinets, the daybed piled with deflated pillows of various sizes, the spindle-legged desk the color of eggnog, the single wobbly dining chair with a ripped wicker seat, the stuffed chintz chair with greasy armrests. The fireplace had been jammed full of cardboard boxes of clothes, not his. The gap between daybed and chintz chair was just wide enough to allow passage to the filthy window, through which it was sometimes possible to assemble an approximate sense of the weather. Candlesticks encrusted with dusty wax were fused to the air conditioner casing. The kitchen was four squares of linoleum, an oven that whanged into the refrigerator when he opened it. Inside were shoes, not his. The bathroom was wedged in behind the kitchen. Heavy porcelain fixtures, H&C, a standing waste, crumbling grout and crooked tiles and a tub streaked ochre. The little casement window operated by a rusty crank. It was in the ancient ruin of a sink that he threw up every morning, exhausted, his body a sack of wet bones he willed into a standing position long enough for him to complete the expulsive ritual. Then he went back to bed and lay there for another hour of sweaty recriminations. He saw her everywhere, and he saw his boy everywhere. Through a crowd on Columbus, getting on a bus, the two of them holding hands.
He’d stayed in the sublet for months, though he couldn’t afford rent on both places. Some nights he would wander up Broadway and over on 83rd to their building, take the elevator to the eighth floor, walk to the door, position his key. There was an empty apartment on the other side of the door, but he would imagine that she was inside, alone, and he was aware that he’d pushed his own loneliness into the spotlight, and that he was grieving then for himself more than for his son or his marriage. He was not inexorably drawn to the apartment. The door did not exert a magnetic force on him. So, then, why was he there? To test his broken spirit, of course, but why test it in this way, standing there at the door performing his grief—not real grief but a pantomime grief that existed alongside his actual grief, like a pool of gravy under a grisly, cold slab of meat. He was audience and actor when he stood at the door, imagining that she was inside, standing on the other side of the door, listening. What would he do if he were to unlock the door and find her there? He would enter. She would beg him to reconcile. She would fall to her knees, her cheeks wet with tears, throw her arms around his legs, and wail into his pants leg, Please please please, and the apartment would be in disarray, her clothes flung over the backs of chairs, bras on the floor, the sink piled with dishes, the white glow of the television in the bedroom, a damp towel reeking of mildew lumped on the sofa, empty
