“Yes, I do.”
Julian returned to his apartment from a night alone listening to a Malian singer to find Aidan watching a Jeopardy! rerun. Julian was, of course, not allowed to speak until the show was over and Aidan had added up his own (winning) score. “I was thinking tonight of this story Dad told me about the hospital in Tokyo,” Julian said, bringing beer and chips to the living room. “He was recovering, but still feeling sorry for himself, and—”
“So he said,” Aidan scoffed. “That was a classic of his methods. The more he could fault himself for self-pity, the less tolerable it was for anyone else ever to feel bad. The more cowardly he described himself, the more courageous he was. One day I summoned up the nerve and called him on it, and then I never had to hear any more of his war stories. I was freed from the catechism of his courage.”
So Julian kept the story to himself. Their father was in the hospital looking at his leg and crying when they wheeled a guy into his room, still unconscious after surgery, and they parked him a few feet away. Their father studied this guy’s half an arm before he woke up. He felt good looking at someone else with a stump, weighed whether an arm was worse than a leg. “So, the guy comes out of it, Jules, and he’s a big guy, a Marine, and he opens his eyes and looks down at his arm, cut off above the elbow, and then he looks up at me and says, ‘Oh, well, there goes my sex life.’ I laughed so hard, Julian, I almost felt fine. I wanted to measure up to this guy’s grace, so I said, pointing to my leg, ‘I’m going to have to kick from the left now or the Packers are going to drop me.’ Proudest I ever was of myself.”
Aidan started to speak, stopped, started again with a kinder voice, but it required effort: “I don’t think much about him, Cannonball. You and he had a very different experience, you know,” he said, brightening, “thanks to his earlier efforts at parenthood. You were much more to his taste in every regard. He found me, oh, a puzzle, and he didn’t do puzzles. Did he ever tell you this piece of advice? ‘We enter this world alone, screaming, son. We exit the world alone, maybe screaming again, and ideally with some of our wits still about us. In between you decide who to marry, who to obey, who to invest with, who to hate, all on your own. Good luck to you.’ That’s what I heard a lot of as a kid.”
Over the years, their father collected amputee jokes (“And the Italian scientist says, ‘Frog-a with-a no legs deaf!’”). This proved either that their father was brave and kind, determined to make others comfortable (Julian’s position), or that he was bullying others with his false stoicism, denying anyone close to him the right to feel pain over anything less than losing a leg (Aidan’s position).
The two pictures of him could not be merged. “How many women do you think he had, by being both brave and a sideshow attraction?” Aidan asked. This was another of the unsolved, unsolvable sub-mysteries of their father: Julian and Aidan had been raised by two different one-legged, inflatable-castle-and-rat-distributing, Korean War veteran, Billie Holiday idolaters. This was partially because Aidan was sixteen when their mother died; Julian, six. Julian had been raised by a father who was only ever miserably widowed, who never touched another woman after his true love died, barring a single dinner date, from which he returned early and said to his thirteen-year-old son, “You never know when you’re about to be too old for some things. You only know when suddenly you are too old.” (As Julian knew he was too old to obsess over pop singers.)
Aidan, however, claimed to have been raised by a heartless, unipedal satyr, hopping after skirts, whose penis overcompensated for the missing limb, and who enjoyed a widowhood marked by an endless “carnal gluttony,” the same charge Aidan leveled at Julian in his looser years and continued to level long after Julian, more or less monastic, had turned over a new leaf, or been turned over by one and nearly crushed by it.
The only evidence Julian saw to support Aidan’s theory was the undeniable effect his father had had on Julian’s own young girlfriends.
“What happened to your dad’s leg?” one fourteen-year-old girl asked Julian, as they sat in the kitchen, homework spread out and ignored between them.
“He lost it in Korea.”
“Wrong,” his father called from the next room. “I didn’t lose it. I know exactly where I left it.”
The girl laughed, not nervously, not embarrassed to have her question overheard. Julian felt something he couldn’t put words to, but which made him angry at his father for some days after.
“Mr. Donahue, may I ask you a question? A personal question?” a sixteen-year-old girlfriend later asked directly. She’d always looked strangely at his father, and Julian had blithely assumed it was the same look of countless male friends, the stolen glance at the damaged man’s absences.
“Proceed, young lady,” he intoned. “I am prepared for any inquiry.”
“What does it feel like? Where it used to be?”
“Liz,” Julian protested, feeling she wasn’t asking like boys did.
“That’s all right, Cannonball.” His father smiled at him. “He’s very protective of me, Lizzie. I’ll show you what it feels like.” He pushed himself up from his chair and beckoned her to him. She didn’t hesitate but rose from the couch, left Julian behind her without a glance. “Autumn in New York” was on the stereo, and Julian could never hear that late-Holiday version, on his iPod or anywhere else, without feeling an echo of sickening certainty that his father was about to have Julian’s girlfriend touch the obscenely puckered end of his hip.
Liz walked toward the man like a volunteer at a hypnosis performance, stood in front of him and shivered, her back to Julian, who didn’t move his two legs. “Right,” said his father. “Stand there and close your eyes.”
“Dad.”
“She’ll be okay, Tiger.”
He pulled his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and gently placed them on his son’s girlfriend’s head, propped up high on her hair. She audibly inhaled at the sensation of the glasses alighting, though the old man’s fingers never touched her. “Just my reading glasses. Now count to thirty.”
Liz obeyed, murmuring the numbers slowly, dragging it out while Julian sat and sat and sat.
“Dad.”
“Would you lighten up, J?”
When she reached twenty-five, his father very gently, unnoticeably, removed the glasses, restowed them in his pocket. At thirty, she kept her eyes shut, scrupulously obedient, until he told her to open them, and then he asked her to take off the glasses. She reached for them, surprised to find only hair. “There,” he said. “That’s what it feels like.”
Said a later girl, eighteen now, kissing Julian on the beach lifeguard’s high chair at midnight, the flaking white paint under her nails, the sweet citric taste of her skin, the blackness of the lake under summer constellations, “He’s very distinguished-looking.” Julian was no longer astonished by such comments. “What does it look like?” He knew she meant the Cape of No Hope. “Is it smooth? Or sore?” An odd sensation, to be sure, feeling jealous of your father’s amputation stump as a popular girl chewed your earlobe.
“You know when you wear your sunglasses up on your forehead?” Julian whispered. Stranger words of seduction must once have been spoken somewhere by someone; one is statistically not likely to be history’s most extreme case of anything. Julian reached a brassiere’s white-satin northern boundary and crossed into foreign lands, bearing his father’s documentation.
“Do you remember the day of Pamela’s funeral?” Aidan asked on his third excursion to Julian’s refrigerator for prosciutto and cheese.
“Not really.”
“Yes or no, Cannonball. Yes or no.”
“I’ll stick with ‘Not really’ thanks.”
“Well, mine’s a clear yes, and clearest of all was you left to your own devices in the living room while Dad pretended to be brave for some relation or business friend, and you were staring out the window, pretending to eat cookies. ‘Mmm, these are good cookies,’ you kept saying, shoveling imaginary cookies in
to your mouth, and the tears rolling down your cheeks. I went to get Dad, and he watched you do this for a while without interrupting you, and then he left you alone. ‘Best not bother him, Aid,’ he said, and that really impressed me, how willing he was to let his child suffer by himself. A six-year-old child.”
“I was seven.”
“No, you were still six. Add it up: April comes before July.”
Julian remembered a midnight-blue velvet toque, quilted and layered over a hairless skull and browless eyes. “You really think he screwed around? When she was alive?”
Aidan ignored the question. “I think of you and your cookies, and I look at you now, and you seem very much unchanged. I blame myself. I should’ve made Dad talk to you, or done it myself, but he bullied me into leaving you alone for your own supposed good. I won’t make that mistake again.”
“I’m touched.”
“You’re not, but you should be.” Aidan finished a beer and opened another. “So do me a favor, would you? I know you have a new Boleyn on the hook, but there’s someone I want you to meet. I’m not going to lecture you. I’m just saying, do me a favor. Meet a friend of mine for a drink. Open mind.”
“How do you know she’s for me? Maybe she’s just right for you.”
“Don’t let’s start talking about me now. I know what’s right for me.”
“The thought of you setting me up with someone—it’s like I’ve ingested some very potent hallucinogenic leaf.” But Julian agreed to the daft blind date because he felt ready for something, and maybe that was the quote-unquote real meaning of his experience with Cait O’Dwyer. He agreed because he’d been thinking so much lately of his father’s lonely old age and whether he was destined to repeat it, or if he had already begun it. In fact, he had lately caught himself believing that being alone forever would be just the thing. He agreed because Aidan asked nicely, and because, if nothing else, it would be a diversion. Even then, the fantasy tickled him that somehow Aidan knew everything and meant to introduce him to Cait O’Dwyer, and Julian nearly called it off because that was not how he wanted them to meet, before he reentered earth orbit and prepared himself to murder an innocent twilight hour with some unspeakable trivia queen.
17
JULIAN HAD SEEN HER in labor, splayed and incontinent, and at Carlton’s deathbed, shaking and mucused, so preening for a date was a little nonsensical, even openly dishonest. Like an ad. Still, she wavered: contacts or glasses, hair up or down, skirt or pants, something he’d bought her or something he’d never seen.
She walked and weighed how much she would confess, apologize for, claim for the future. She passed the hospital, smoking orderlies chatting on the windy sidewalk despite full gurneys, and she felt a swell of gratitude to Aidan, her productive household genius, able to deliver his brother and her hopes.
Just hopes, only that. In the best of circumstances there were miles of apologies to issue, vast awkward chasms to fill, forests of expectations to clear, memories to make room for, unless he was coming ready, like her, not to begin again, but just to be again, to keep going, ready to accept that, at this late hour, this was better than anything else on offer.
He was already there, at a table behind glass in a neutral space without any memories of its own, and so, watching him from across the street, she stroked another small feather of hope: at the very worst, he did at least want to see her and talk, even if only to demand, finally, a divorce. She may even have been reading the world correctly again, no longer crazy with sadness or dizzy from missteps: he was there, and she was happier to see him there, just willing to talk, than she had ever been walking toward waiting strangers with flashing flowers and aromatic smiles. “Hello.”
“Rachel?” She saw his surprise, and her hopes cannibalized to survive for one more second: he was surprised how well she looked, how hard the sight of her hit him, how much he now realized he’d missed her—”You’re Aidan’s ‘friend’?” he asked, with that little laugh of annoyance being processed and tolerated. “Not much of a blind date.”
Wonder at her own stupidity stopped her breath until she found a noncommittal “Oh, Aidan.”
“I wasn’t really in the mood for that anyhow.” He asked her to sit. Somehow coffee came.
“Well,” she admitted, “I wasn’t blind, at least.” Then she lied: “He told me you wanted to talk.”
“He’s funny.”
“He’s very lonely, you know.”
“Trust me. Aidan wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Of course he would. Don’t be mean. I didn’t really help him much.”
“I know you did,” he said hurriedly, as if she’d been fishing for overdue praise. “I’m grateful.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” she snapped, and could have cut out her tongue with the coffee spoon. “Sorry.”
She had once, under very specific conditions, developed the ability to lie to him, but the valves had rusted and stuck, and when she answered with a rote “I’ve been good, how about you?” he looked at her with gentle disbelief but no counterbalancing sympathy, and she felt all her options snapping shut like mousetraps.
The man alone at the table next to theirs talked quietly into his cell phone but, bending back against his chair, his eyes closed, his free hand squeezing his temples, he could be heard saying: “Yeah, I’m at the gate now.” Relieved to turn to events outside themselves, Rachel and Julian widened their eyes at each other. “My flight leaves in twenty minutes, so I’ll be there by—yeah—don’t wait up. Me, too.” He closed his phone and pushed his palms against his eyes.
“Did you ever pull that one on me?” Julian whispered.
“Can’t recall. What about you?”
“Yeah, I should tell you, I wasn’t really on that space launch.”
“Nice. Aidan says you’re busy.”
“Huh. Yeah. It’s good. There’s plenty of money if that’s what you wanted to talk about.”
To which, as if she were a broken talking doll with its string stuck halfway out of the hole in her back, she said something she’d meant to say later, if at all—”We did make a very nice baby once”—and then looked down at the cream in its metal pitcher, its off-center lid, its loose handle and dull pewter finish, and felt as bad with him as alone.
“Not much of an immune system,” he said, not unkindly, but with a false offhand shrug, refusing to go into any of that.
She could feel him fighting to fly away from her, as if she were hanging from the tie ropes of his carefully ballasted one-man hot-air balloon. She had lived without him and not died. She had friends, options, an ear for good advice. But she wasn’t a fantasist to believe that life could be better when reassembled from damaged, familiar shapes, rather than frittered away endlessly looking for something new. There was no restoration to factory condition anymore; there was only slowing down the decay. Still, she couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t too much, too soon, too sorry, too pleading, and so she said, “Aidan’s setting you up on dates?”
“He has refused to discuss his love life with me for nearly three decades.”
“Only because he’s intimidated by you. He envies you.”
“I can tell when you’re lying, you know.”
“Sorry.” He could. “It wasn’t all bad,” she said.
“No, I know. I know.” He looked at his swirling coffee. “There was a lot I loved. For a long time. I still do.”
“You have to know it wasn’t about you, the end. I was so unhappy about other things, about everything.”
“And that will never happen again?”
“Would you believe me if I said yes?”
“Probably not, no.” They laughed.
“Do you want to hear it anyhow?”
“That’s okay, thanks.”
She hadn’t meant to say anything about trying again, had only wanted to see him, and for him to see her, for him to have a few minutes being half of them, just a reminder, to show they could be calm, maybe even warm
. That would be enough for today. But she could feel his resistance as he looked out the window, longing to be away from her and them. When he turned back, he asked about work, portioning out the charm that always flowed effortlessly for him whenever he needed to tap it, but that was as silly as her preening at home for him after he’d seen all her intimate horrors. He’d always had this power to fade out, present less and less of himself to hold on to, replacing himself with slick, sleek panels of wit, gossip, professional concerns. She remembered, really only now, how irritating she used to find that. She’d put that out of her mind in these months of dying. She was becoming angry with him, though he hadn’t done or said anything, when she had ambushed him. Angry now, when she had hoped to rearrange her misery and loneliness around his presence. “No, stop. I’m not here for small talk. But I’m not here to beg either. I’m just talking. We can file divorce papers if you want. I’m not standing in your way.”
“If I want? I haven’t—I don’t know why. If you want to, we can. Is that why you wanted to meet?”
“I could have done that on the phone.”
“So what do you want? Can I ask: What were all your others for, if it wasn’t to show me how useless I was?”
She felt a touch of relief at that: he had questions he’d asked himself, too, polished and phrased just so, rehearsed during countless imaginary confrontations. “You won’t believe me. Honestly, a lot of times I was trying to feel useful, like, I think, you did. They were usually sad, and I felt better when I cheered them up.”
“So a spree of altruism. Not philandery, philanthropy.”
“Not entirely.” She indulged his point, willing to show remorse if his ego demanded, so they could move on and shore up their losses. “I confess to all the same sins as everyone else. As should you. But I couldn’t do it, really. I hated everyone. I blamed strangers for not knowing what I had to do to bring him back, to bring us back. To fix you.” But after allowing himself to flare into focus for a moment, a glimpse, Julian was flickering out again, no time to see if she’d been right. A sexless infant in a stroller banged its plastic spoon against its own face, threw the spoon with a splatter of applesauce onto the floor, began to shriek.