Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  *

  Paul was there when they got back. He had been waiting around for several hours longer than he had expected to, which always made him unreasonably angry. This fact alone was upsetting to him. The new laid-back self wasn’t supposed to care about these slight affronts or revealed indifferences, but somehow he was stuck with the old self that did care. When he was home he sometimes went out into the backyard with a tennis racket and ball. Behind the playhouse there was an odd extra bit of land, tacked on because of the angle of the road, with a solid concrete wall at the far end, supporting the parking lot of a cooperative grocery store. For some reason the level of the stores on the main drag was fifteen feet higher than the level of the residential streets. Bill, when the kids were kids, turned this extra bit of backyard into a small court and Paul used to hit balls against the wall by the hour. This is where he spent his childhood, every day after school more or less regardless of the weather. Hitting a tennis ball into a concrete wall.

  So he went there now and banged a ball around and worked up a sweat—the winter sunshine was warm enough for that, he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. When Liesel told him she had invited Dana to come for Christmas his first reaction was to have no reaction or to have as little of a reaction as it was possible for him to show. In general, this was his policy when discussing matters that affected him intimately. If you care about the honesty of your reactions then there’s always this slight delay—you have to register what you actually feel, you have to check your sources, and the upshot of all this due diligence is that it makes it almost impossible to have honest reactions. But Paul still preferred the slight artificiality or coldness of people who measure their words to the alternative, to be one of those people who have to keep apologizing afterward for misrepresenting their positions in the heat of the moment. Also, Liesel was his mother, she was seventy-four years old, she loved him, she meant well, and he had no deep-seated resentments or reproaches to work out against her. His childhood was pretty great. Anyway, it was usually Jean’s job to take her to task for clumsy interference.

  Half an hour later he went inside to get a drink and they still weren’t there. It was now almost five o’clock, getting dark and cool. He could have called Dana on her cell to find out where the hell everyone was, he wanted to see his son, but they didn’t have the kind of phone habit anymore that would have made this a normal thing to do. It would have suggested pent-up resentment, which is what he felt and could not have kept out of his voice. Bill was in the TV room watching a football game. There was half a watermelon on the counter by the sink, lying in its Saran Wrap, beaded with condensation or juice, and Paul cut himself a slice and joined his father. One of those meaningless pre-Christmas third-tier bowl games, the Collision Repair and Auto Painting Bowl or something like that. Boise State was playing, those guys in the bright blue and bright orange uniforms, totally chemical-looking. Third quarter, already a wipeout, Boise State was running away with it and Bill said, slumped on the sofa, half-lying down, with his feet kicked out on the footstool, “They should have been ranked higher. All year long they were telling everybody, we can do what we do against anybody, any of the big-name conferences, and now it turns out they were right.”

  Paul sat down on the rocking chair and picked at the seeds in his watermelon slice with a fork. When you’re basically unemployed, this particular dead patch of the year, when everybody else is just glad to get to the holidays, to kick back for a few days before the pressure of Christmas itself starts to tell, is especially depressing, because your whole life is like this, a kind of waiting around for other people who are busier than you to intersect briefly with your life. Even though whatever keeps them busy is rarely very satisfying to them, even though they complain about their jobs and lives and pretend to envy you, somehow they leave it to you to work out the problem of what to do with existence in the absence of meaningless small goals.

  “I don’t know.” Paul took a piece of the watermelon on his fork—it was still cold. The watermelon was pretty good. “What usually happens is they play against some mid-conference team from what turns out to be one of the weaker major conferences and then it’s not surprising Boise State can run up the score. Didn’t they lose to TCU?”

  “TCU has a pretty good football team this year,” Bill said.

  The front door opened, you could hear it from the TV room, a click and then the sound of voices, and Jean was walking down the corridor saying, “Sorry guys, Paul!, sorry we’re so late, we could use a hand with the tree …” and Paul felt his heart rate accelerating in spite of himself, and without, it seemed, any sympathy or participation from his conscious mind, though whether it was because he was going to see Cal or he was going to see Dana he couldn’t tell.

  Liesel followed Jean into the TV room. “It’s a big tree,” she said.

  “Where’s Cal?” Paul asked, getting up and setting his watermelon bowl on the floor.

  “Dana’s taking him to the bathroom. He was very good.”

  “Pick up the bowl,” Bill said. “Someone’s going to step on it.”

  “How’s Dana?”

  “She’s fine,” Jean said. “She’s in the bathroom. It’s an okay tree, we got lucky. Every year we leave it too late.”

  “That’s because you kids always want to help,” Liesel said.

  “Pick up the bowl,” Bill said.

  “The only person who really cares is Susie and even she agreed that this year she was arriving too late.”

  “I want to put it in a bucket of water,” Liesel said, and then, to Paul: “Maybe you can help Jean carry it around the back.”

  “I want to see my son.”

  The TV room was part of the kitchen extension, which included the breakfast room next door. Paul walked down a hallway into the old part of the house. The toilet was under the stairs. Dana stood outside the opened door, watching Cal, who was sitting on the pot and looking totally chilled-out on the pot and not in any hurry. Dana turned around when she heard Paul. He hadn’t seen her in a month, since he flew to New York at Thanksgiving to spend a little time with his son. Whenever he saw her after an absence there was a buildup of static charge, the kind that gives you an instant and consistently surprising slight jolt on contact. She hugged him dutifully, two arms but little pressure and a quick release. Then Cal stood up and bent over, and Paul said, “That’s all right, I can do it,” and leaned into the bathroom to pick a piece of toilet paper from the roll.

  “You always do it so it hurts,” Cal said.

  “I’m sorry, kid. I like a clean butt.”

  “I like it more when Mommy does it.”

  “Is this any way to greet your father?”

  But he wasn’t sure for whose benefit he was saying it, Cal’s or Dana’s or maybe for Jean, who was now standing and waiting in the hallway traffic jam, and said, “You ready to move the tree? Liesel’s fricasseeing about putting it in water.”

  “What does fricasseeing mean?” Dana asked.

  “Nothing. Not what Jean thinks it means.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “All right. All done. Now wash your hands,” and Paul washed his hands in the sink while Cal pulled up his pants. Dana was looking at him when he came out. That patina of strangeness which their changed relations had allowed to accumulate, week by week and month by month, seemed to add a gloss or maybe he just saw her again for what she actually was, an extremely handsome woman, tall and skillfully and fashionably dressed, the kind of woman you hesitate to approach at a party because of her obvious good looks, which makes your reason for speaking to her seem a little obvious, too. “Hey,” Paul said, “it’s nice to see you,” and then turning to Jean, “Come on, let’s get this over with,” because on some level he had realized that playing the casual brother at home with his family gave him some advantage over Dana or might put him in a more attractive light than she usually saw him in these days.

  *

  Paul stayed for supper; he wanted to put Cal to
bed. This involved some negotiation because Cal was used to sleeping in Jean’s old room when he stayed over at Wheeler Street and it had to be explained to him that Jean was actually there. “I don’t mind,” Jean said, “if he wants to sleep with me. We can move the crib in. Until Henrik comes.” But this wasn’t really a serious offer and nobody took it seriously, including Cal. They let him go downstairs to watch TV for a bit, which meant that Bill had to switch the channel from his football game, and then they tried again. In the end, Paul gave up and let Dana deal with it. It didn’t seem to help to have two of them around. Bill was driving out to Sunflower, the Vietnamese place off 183, which was Dana’s favorite restaurant in Austin, to pick up some food and Paul offered to come along.

  Dana sat with Cal until he fell asleep, which wasn’t long, because they’d had a very early start that morning. With the time difference, his bedtime had been pushed back anyway. She lay on the bed next to the crib, in that funny crowded charming little junk-store room, and almost fell asleep herself while she listened to his breathing. But in fact she lay there awake and tried to get a hold on her impressions and feelings. It was nice to take a break from the Essinger atmosphere for a few minutes, or maybe fifteen or twenty. But she also liked knowing it was there, that she could step into it again whenever she wanted. At home in New York, unless she made special arrangements, she was stuck in the apartment every night after Cal went to sleep. Liesel had said to her, “If you ever want to go out while you’re here, just go. We can look after Cal, he’s pretty used to us by now. Even if you just want to sit in the Spider House after putting him to bed.”

  The Spider House was a café and bar just two minutes’ walk from the back gate—it had firepits in the winter and lots of colored lights and rusty outdoor furniture, it was a nice place to sit. And part of what Dana was thinking as she lay there was, Jean and I could go and get a frozen margarita. Or I could just go by myself. She was trying to work out which she wanted to do and if it was rude to go alone and ended up doing neither, she just lay there listening to Cal and thinking, Paul looks skinny. Whenever they talked on the phone he sounded totally unchanged but every time she saw him he looked skinnier and skinnier. It was nice to have Cal lying next to her because without him she would have felt a long way away from her own life and right in the middle of Paul’s. Almost deliberately, almost consciously, she started narrating to herself these feelings and observations in the form of a conversation with Stephen, and then, feeling weird and a little heartsick, stopped. It’s like, you have to understand this family, it’s like, with them you’re always in the middle of some argument, not an argument, but it’s like that, and everyone’s having it together, and whatever you say it’s connected to something somebody else said, and has a different opinion about, and so on. And it never ends.

  * * *

  They took North Lamar out to 183—most of the stores had Christmas lights in the window. When Paul spent time with his parents he reverted to high-school mode. In high school, he was a pretty good kid, he never rebelled much, he kept his own counsel, and that’s what he was like with them now. Bill was always an errand father. He was one of those dads who drove you around and picked you up, and his idea of hanging out was the car ride on the way to practice or the restaurant. The rest of the time, the time at home, he was happy to watch TV and mostly shut up, but in the car he liked to talk.

  He said, “The ALEA is meeting in Austin this year.”

  It was easier talking like this, with both of you staring ahead at the road or looking off at the side streets passing in the dark. The radio in the car hadn’t worked in years, otherwise Paul would have turned it on. It was warm enough he lowered his window for a minute, just to feel the air, and then shut it again.

  “I don’t know what that is,” he said. You forget sometimes your parents are people, too, with their own self-obsessions. It’s amazing how little as a kid you care about what their lives are actually like.

  “It’s the law and economics society. Nathan is giving a talk this year. So am I.”

  “Well, can we listen to you? Is there a … public gallery?”

  “You can come. I don’t know how much of what I say you’ll understand.”

  They passed the old Highland Mall, where Susie used to go as a teenager to meet her friends and eat ice cream among the indoor plants. But the parking lot surrounding it was dark now, there were unused grassy areas, it looked depressing. Susie was the only mall rat among the kids; she felt the pressures of socialization more than the rest. Highland was the first mall in Austin, but now all the hipsters had rolled into town, with their independent boutiques, and nobody wanted to go there. Bill said, “They’re closing it down. The community college is taking over the site. At least that’s what they say.”

  “Americans,” Paul said. “They don’t want to shop anymore. They just want to learn.”

  “Anyway, the ALEA is putting on a panel this year. About my work.”

  “That’s great,” Paul said. “That’s nice.”

  “The way it goes, I give a paper, and they invite a couple of people to respond to it. It’s up to me to pick the guys.”

  Bill was an economist—the kind who, he liked to say, had spent his life trying to prove what economics couldn’t tell you about the world. This hadn’t always made him popular in the profession.

  “You want to hear something funny,” he said. “UT is going to publish these responses online, alongside my original paper.” Bill paused a little, he made a kind of laughing noise, like a humorous sigh. “Yesterday I get an email from the editor. My secretary prints it out for me. You know what he wrote?”

  He waited for Paul to say, “What?” You realize after a while that everybody’s internal lives are full of this kind of thing, it’s endless, all you get are glimpses of it in other people. Paul said, “What?”

  Bill told him—a long list of redactions made because the material covered in his paper “duplicates” some of the arguments in the talks. I mean, they’re supposed to be responding to me. So Bill has to go through the redactions, item by item. That’s what he was doing this morning, before picking up Dana and Cal from the airport. It takes him three hours in the office and he’s halfway through. This is how you spend your life. Nobody ever reacts to these stories the way people want you to, and Paul knew that he had failed to react in that way.

  “What’s Nathan talking about?” he said, after a minute. It was nice just sitting in the car—he could feel the day’s run in his bones. And also, what he felt for his father was something else, a complicated form of identification. So this guy is also out there hitting balls against the wall.

  “The legality of drones. They’ve put him in Dwight Auditorium, which seats about five hundred people.”

  North Lamar came to an end and Bill merged onto 183, one of those elevated highways that curves around the city. Even at that time of night, it was full of cars, people heading home, into the dark flat increasingly developed countryside north of Austin.

  “This city keeps growing,” Bill said, and then: “You know where they’ve got me? The Ronald B. Koenig Seminar Room at the business school. Capacity thirty-five.”

  “There’s a whole panel on your work. I don’t feel that sorry for you.”

  “Your brother is in demand,” Bill said. “I am in supply.”

  But he was in a good mood—this is the kind of thing he liked, talking like this, making jokes. Deprecation had the effect on him of genuinely cheering him up.

  “Well, join the crowd.”

  The raised highway was about the level of the treetops, Paul could see the roofs of houses and warehouses between the leaves. Somewhere out there, in the streets below them, was the medical complex where the dentist he went to as a kid worked.

  “Cal seems happy enough,” Bill said. “He’s excited about seeing his cousins.”

  Maybe this is the conversation he’d been waiting to have. Bill’s attitude from the first had been noninterventionist. He had mor
e sympathy than Liesel, as a general rule, for the reasons men and women choose not to live together anymore. But Paul also had a fairly good idea of what his father thought about the whole thing.

  “I guess. I didn’t see much of him today. They spent all that time … picking a tree. It’s hard to find one where you can put the candles on.”

  “One of these days they’re going to burn the house down,” Bill said.

  They exited 183 and turned at the off-ramp quickly, doubling back almost, and parked outside the restaurant, which was practically under the highway, you could hear the traffic noise thrumming overhead, and went inside to get the food. Bill said that Paul could wait in the car but Paul came in anyway. There was a fish tank on the counter. He looked at the fish, feeling a little fishlike himself. Like he was staring at everything with his mouth open, not saying much. Bill as always chatted up the waitress, who lifted a couple of steaming bags over the counter, plastic inside paper, and they headed out again, into the mild night, and got in the car.

  “I like Dana,” Bill said, pulling away. “I don’t always get a lot out of her, but I like her.”

  “She’s very smart.” For some reason, Paul wanted to defend her. “She was Phi Beta Kappa at Amherst. Already by her junior year. When she left.”

  “I’m sure she is, but there’s a WASP quality, which in its way is very attractive, although I also find it hard to penetrate.”

  “That’s just what she’s like,” Paul said. “There’s nothing really underneath it that’s very different.”

  He thought he was protecting her, against some accusation that Bill hadn’t exactly made, of phoniness or superficiality, but he realized after he said it that what he said didn’t sound like a defense. Anyway, it ended the conversation and they drove in silence back the way they had come. Eventually Bill said, turning off at 32nd Street, between the limestone pillars onto the darker and greener neighborhood streets, and then turning again onto Wheeler, with its familiar curve: “The Longhorns are playing at the Erwin Center. Nathan wanted to go with the kids. Cal seems to me old enough now to get something out of it. Should I get you tickets?”