Apartment, page 10
The TV flashed to footage of the president voting for himself earlier that day and waving to the cameras with a presumptively victorious smile.
“Clinton puts on a show of being for the little guy, but only if the people in power, like him, don’t have to give up anything of real value,” he went on.
I thought about mentioning that Clinton, like him, grew up without a father, in a small, economically marginalized town, that he might be a flawed individual but he’d also risen to where he was by dint of his intellect and hard work. But then Billy added, “Just like a lot of the people who vote for him,” and I didn’t respond.
Billy went to the bathroom, and after he returned I steered the conversation toward school. We stopped watching at nine o’clock, when the election was called for the incumbent.
The week before Thanksgiving I asked Billy if he was doing anything for it. A scheduling quirk due to the holiday had left him without any hours at the bar for the long weekend, he said, so he just planned to read and write.
“You could come home with me,” I said. “My aunt and uncle and cousin are coming for dinner, but they’re not sleeping over, and we’ve got a guest room.”
“How do you get there?” he asked. “Train or bus?”
“I actually fly. It’s just an hour on the Delta Shuttle.”
“Oh. Well, I can’t afford a plane.”
“You can use two of my tickets,” I said. “They’re transferable.”
“How much are they?”
My father bought my tickets for me in discounted blocks of eight at sixty dollars apiece.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
We flew on Thanksgiving morning to avoid the Wednesday mayhem. I sprang for a cab to La Guardia, telling Billy, who wanted to take public transportation, that I would have gotten one without him, too.
At the airport, the metal detector went off when he stepped through the gate, and he immediately looked to me with panic. “I’m sorry,” he said to the TSA employee.
“You have to remove your belt, sir,” said the security officer.
I said nothing about the plane, not wanting to make him feel self-conscious about his maiden flight. After boarding, he peered around the cabin, examining—but not touching—the overhead compartments, the seat buttons, even the folding tray. He seemed to have a childlike curiosity tempered by adult embarrassment over experiencing this for the first time in his twenties. When we took off, his hands gripped the armrests until the pilot’s airborne announcement. He had the window seat and spent most of the hourlong trip gazing out. He tensed up again upon landing and shut his eyes for the final minute until the wheels hit the tarmac.
“By the way,” I said as I spotted my mother’s Nissan from the passenger pickup area, “I didn’t tell my parents you’re living with me, in case my great-aunt isn’t crazy about the idea. So let’s just pretend you live in university housing.” My great-aunt wouldn’t have minded at this point, but I didn’t want word to get back to my father, who would ask if Billy was contributing to the rent.
We climbed into the backseat of my mother’s car, and I made introductions as we pulled out of Logan. “Your parents are still there?” she asked after he told her where he was from in Illinois.
“Yep. They’re divorced.”
“What do they do?”
“My mom works at a dentist’s office. And my dad is at a landscaping company,” he said, the last job he’d heard of his holding.
“And where are you living in New York?”
His eyes darted over to mine. “University housing,” he said.
The white Colonial we’d been in since I was born was in a neighborhood lushly canopied by oaks and Norway maples, whose streets, patrolled by a private security van, had a hushed placidity that suggested such a prophylactic measure was superfluous. Upon entering and removing his shoes, Billy took in the nineteenth-century British oil reproductions decking the foyer. I felt obligated to give him a tour, so I guided him past the antique dishes and Shaker spinning wheel on display in the living room and loitered in the less froufrou spaces, like the TV room, which housed a dusty Zenith set from the mid-eighties and a NordicTrack skier.
I asked if he wanted to go in to Boston for a few hours before my aunt and uncle, their son, and his fiancée arrived from Connecticut.
“Shouldn’t we help your mother with the food?” he asked.
“She’s fine,” I said.
He squinted. “You sure? She’s making Thanksgiving dinner for seven people.”
“We’d just get in the way.”
“I’d still like to offer.”
At his insistence she allowed him to pitch in. I guiltily volunteered, too, and we chopped vegetables for the stuffing at the table. “Billy, could you pass me the broccoli rabe?” my mother asked from the sink. He surveyed the table’s cornucopia of autumn vegetables: turnips, rutabaga, sweet potatoes, squash, Swiss chard, and ingredients for the salad. I could tell he wasn’t sure what broccoli rabe was and was leaning heavily on the first word for an interpretation.
“I got it,” I said, leaning over the table for the bowl.
Once we’d put in enough time in the kitchen, my mother shooed us out, telling us to relax. “Mind if I watch the Lions game?” Billy asked me. He hadn’t turned on any sports events in our apartment, but I joined him in the TV room and read the Boston Globe while he watched.
“You into the Pats?” he asked.
“More when I was younger,” I lied.
“Makes sense. Sorry about eighty-five.”
“Eighty-five?”
“Super Bowl Twenty,” he said. “Bears-Patriots. Forty-six ten.”
“Right,” I said.
“I had a poster of the Fridge scoring his touchdown over my bed all of high school.” He smiled goofily at the memory. “You guys have a real shot this year with Bledsoe and Martin. And Parcells is the best in the league.”
I grunted and went to the kitchen for some water.
“You know who I saw yesterday at Star Market?” my mother said to me. “Michelle Stein. Remember her?”
“Vaguely,” I said as I retrieved a glass from the cupboard.
She closed the kitchen door.
“Well, her daughter married a man who got testicular cancer,” she said in a quieter voice. “In both sides, apparently. And the sperm they saved before his operation wasn’t working with fertility treatments. So they adopted a beautiful little girl from China.”
I ran the cold water.
“She said she thinks her daughter loves her even more than if she were her own,” my mother continued.
I filled my glass before the water was cold enough for my liking.
“There are several adopted children in her kindergarten, too,” she said. “It’s apparently much easier to do nowadays, through agencies and what have you.”
“I get it.” I knocked down the tap. “Good for Michelle Stein’s daughter.”
I returned to the TV room and the arts section of the Globe. Near the end of the game the phone rang, and after a moment my mother said my father wanted to speak with me. We hadn’t talked since the semester had started, and any cash infusions I’d needed had been obtained by my leaving him messages on his answering machine when he was at work. I took the cordless into my room and didn’t pick up until the door was closed.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Hello, there,” he said. “Happy Thanksgiving from San Diego.” He and my age-appropriate stepmother went there on the major holidays to visit her extended family.
“You, too.” I cleared my throat. “How’s the weather out there?”
“It got up to about sixty-nine today.” He chuckled. “Makes me wonder why we live in Boston.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “It’s been really cold and windy here.”
“Your mother tells me you’ve brought a friend from Columbia home.”
“Billy.”
“And she says you’re enjoying your program?”
I’d told my mother that things were going well in my workshop to prevent her from relaying anything that might make him rethink his tuition payments for an already questionable arts degree. “I am,” I said. “Learning and writing a lot. How’s work?”
“Busy.” He made a little surprised sound, followed by a laugh. “Lisa’s nephew just grabbed onto my leg. He likes it when I walk around with him on board.” To the boy he said, “One minute, you little barnacle.”
I couldn’t recall much roughhousing between us growing up; he interacted with the physical world the way he did as a chemical engineer, abstractly and with forethought, through equations and diagrams, rigorously adhering to the scientific method. I once came across a map of the U.S. he’d used for a cross-country trip we’d taken when I was seven, and each leg of the journey was annotated with mileage and estimated travel time.
He took in a deep, summing-up breath. “Well, happy Thanksgiving again.”
“See you at Christmas.”
“Oh, I didn’t tell you,” he said. “We’re going to Paris, an apartment swap. Lisa’s never been. What days will you be back?”
It turned out our schedules didn’t overlap. He told me he was sorry, but he’d make certain he was around the next time I was in town.
“Sure thing,” I said. “’Bye, Dad.”
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Wait.” I’d always hated this part in college enough that I’d overlooked it until now, where our few minutes of polite phone conversation resulted in a transfer of funds. “I forgot, Columbia needs the check for next semester in two weeks.”
“Okay,” he said as Lisa’s nephew implored him to play. “Just leave me a message at home with the details.” His phone clattered in its cradle. It occurred to me for the first time that my father might retire to San Diego in a decade or so, and if that happened, it was hard to imagine either of us ever visiting the other.
Back in the TV room, Billy was perched on the edge of the couch at a presumably pivotal juncture in the game, the fans raucous, the clock showing less than a minute left. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Hold on,” he said, raising his palm. One of the players was handed the ball and dived into the end zone. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed, leaping to his feet as the crowd deflated. Then he sat down, seemingly embarrassed by his exultation. “Crazy game. How’s your dad?”
I hadn’t talked about him much with Billy after trading notes that first time. “Fine. He’s in San Diego with his wife’s family.”
“Remind me—did your parents split custody?”
My parents had minimized the rupture they’d created by amicably agreeing that my mother, who had done nearly all the parenting anyway, would retain full custody. My father had broken the news and details of the divorce to me ahead of when they’d planned to tell me. I’d woken up in the middle of the night and gone down to the kitchen for something to eat when I noticed, in the open living room, the dark figure of my father under a blanket on the couch.
“Dad?” I asked.
“Go back to sleep,” he mumbled.
“Why are you down here?”
“I had trouble sleeping in the bed.”
“But your back hurts when you lie down on the couch.”
From his pause—and the tense dinners we’d sat through in recent months, most of the conversation triangulated through me—I knew something was wrong. He sat up and put on his glasses from the coffee table. “Come over here,” he said.
I sat by him as he gave me all the usual explanations and assurances: that he and my mother had been having problems lately, that they’d tried their hardest to work things out but nothing was helping, that they loved me and, though it would be painful now, this was the best option for all of us. I had never longed for a sibling as much as at that moment. Older, younger, brother, sister—it didn’t matter; I just wanted another person to shoulder the pain with me, to go through exactly what I’d have to go through.
“I know this has been a difficult time for you. And you’ve been very stoic about … everything,” he said. “But this has nothing to do with you. This is all between your mother and me.”
“I know,” I said.
I told Billy that I’d lived with my mother and that my father came in from Boston once a week to take me to dinner.
Billy was still watching the TV. “My mom told me my dad didn’t come by for six months after they split up.”
“Well, after I went to college, it sort of just became holidays and birthdays,” I said.
“Good thing there are mothers,” he said as the game cut to a commercial. “Yours is nice.”
“Thanks,” I said. “She can be sort of meddling.”
“Better than not giving a shit,” he said.
I wasn’t close to these relatives, seeing them just once or twice a year. My cousin, a year my senior, had brought along his fiancée, whom he’d met in medical school at Johns Hopkins. Thomas was puppyishly exuberant in greetings, hiked and biked on weekends in Maryland, ensconced himself in performance fleece, responded to most comments with “awesome” or a variant. The woman he was engaged to was a distaff version of him. Both seemed incapable of self-doubt or -loathing. They hadn’t set a date yet, but I dreaded whenever it would be.
At dinner Thomas recounted, almost day by day, the two weeks he’d recently spent in Kenya through a medical aid program tending to villagers who lacked basic healthcare, and flaunted a picture of a little boy hugging him. Then he discussed his and his fiancée’s upcoming vacation to Australia over Christmas.
“How about you?” he asked me after he’d indefatigably monologued for a quarter of an hour. “Are you writing a novel?”
“Short stories.”
“Nice. What’re they about?”
“They’re usually about ten to twenty pages long,” I said, my stock deflection. No one laughed. “I don’t like to bore people with descriptions of them.”
“They’re really good,” said Billy.
“Man, I wish I had time to write. I have a million stories from Kenya alone,” Thomas said. “Scratch that—I wish I had time to read.”
The next day I took Billy in to Cambridge. “Sorry about my cousin,” I said over coffee in Café Pamplona. “I know he’s a little much.”
Billy tapped his cigarette against the ashtray more than necessary. “He’s all right.”
“You can say it. I find him really annoying.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just always amazed people will fly halfway around the world to take care of some Africans when there are plenty of African Americans ten minutes away in Baltimore who could use his help.”
“Okay, but the Kenyans need the help even more,” I said. “You could argue that it makes sense from a utilitarian standpoint.”
“Then he could donate the money he spent on his plane ticket directly to the Kenyans. Or if he’s going to go there, do the less glamorous work of helping set up a clinic so they can take care of themselves, instead of needing Americans like him to come in and rescue them.” His mouth twisted scornfully. “Even if he has the best intentions, he wants to be the one to get credit for helping them. He wants the cute picture as a trophy, and it all becomes another fun trip for him to tell a story about. Same as going to fucking Australia.”
Despite my own disdain for Thomas, Billy’s interpretation seemed far too cynical. But I said, “Maybe.” Since the election, I hadn’t brought up politics with him. We clearly weren’t going to come to any agreement, and it would just be a source of friction.
“Sorry, man,” Billy said. “He’s your family, and I’m being a dick. Your cousin’s trying to fix problems in the world, and I’m sitting at home making up problems for imaginary people.”
We spent the rest of the weekend working and hanging out at home. When we were getting ready for the airport on Sunday morning, I couldn’t find my Dopp kit. Billy was in the bathroom, but I didn’t hear the shower running, so I knocked on the door and asked if it was there.
“Yeah,” he said. “Hold on a sec.” The shower turned on. “Okay, come in, it’s on the toilet,” he called.
I opened the door. The sunshine through the window silhouetted his body in profile on the semi-opaque curtain as he stood under the stream. My Dopp kit was on the toilet tank, right next to the shower. I went over for it, and the small gap between the curtain and the wall exposed the muscled curve of his buttocks glazed with water.
I grabbed the Dopp kit and walked out.
6
The week before winter break Billy came to my room and asked if I knew anyone with a car he could pay to borrow. His cousin was getting married that weekend in Pennsylvania, he said, and he hadn’t realized how expensive it was to rent a car in New York or take Amtrak; the cost of either would preclude his staying in a motel. I told him I didn’t.
“Shit. I guess I’ll just take the bus,” he said.
“How long’s the ride?”
“Longer by bus, like nine hours, but I could take it midnight on Friday and come back Sunday.”
“That’ll be terrible. Just say you have a lot of work and can’t make it.”
“I have to go,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “It’s a family thing. Especially since my grandmother broke her hip and my mom has to take care of her.”
I considered lending him the money for the rental but knew he’d say no. Then I had a better idea.
“What if I came with you? I could pay for the car and we could split the motel. I wouldn’t go to the wedding, obviously.”
“Why would you want to spend the whole weekend driving to some shithole town in Pennsylvania?”
“I like road trips,” I answered.
He thought about it as he tapped the side of the doorframe. “I could probably sneak you into the wedding after the dinner.”
“Cool,” I said. “It’ll be nice to get out of the city.”
