He put his hand over mine and stroked my knuckles gently with his thumb. After a while, I said, “My mom thinks he wants to see me, but he’s just—maybe he’s worried I’d be upset it wasn’t sooner, or it’s just easier to not think about. Or he doesn’t come and then he feels bad, so he avoids it, and then it’s this cycle.”
He nodded, slowly. I lifted my cup, though it was empty already. My hands wanted something to do. Jason said, “He lives near here, right?”
“In San Jose. Kind of near Milpitas.”
He took a long drink—a gulp, really—of his coffee and set the cup back down on the table. “You want to go right now?”
“Right now?” I repeated. My first reaction was to laugh; Jason didn’t know my father, how you couldn’t just show up like that. But then I thought: Why not? It was the opposite of what my father had done to me at Christmas. Maybe he was different now, or maybe I was different, and in seeing me he would realize he’d missed me. Or maybe, this time, I would somehow find the courage to speak to him in a way that would make him see me. Maybe it would erase all those times he hadn’t come to see me, and it would be fine after that.
It wasn’t logical, really. Even at the time I knew it wasn’t. But maybe, in a world that imposes so many of its own rules and fates on you, sometimes you stop caring what does and doesn’t make sense because that’s all you can do, really, the only option you’re left with, and what if something comes of it after all?
Or maybe Jason had his own reasons for wanting to go; maybe it meant something different to him. By then I was beginning to understand how both grief and fear can make a person reckless.
But also, I think, I would have gone anywhere with Jason that night.
* * *
We stopped to get gas on our way out. Jason had half a tank left, and my father’s house was barely twenty miles away. But there’s something about the unfamiliar that makes a place seem so far from you, especially when all the things that make up your daily life—your school, your friends, your orchestra—are so neatly contained in such a small radius. At the pump, Jason cleaned his windshield, leaving long, straight streaks across the glass. Taped to the pump was a neon pink paper with two lines of text, HUGE SALE, written on it, and someone had torn off the top right corner so that it read HUG SALE instead. On the freeway, he set the cruise control right at sixty-five and drove in the middle lane. There wasn’t much traffic. It was nearly ten thirty at night.
I think it’s possible that I’d never felt closer to Jason, or maybe to anyone, than I did in the car with him that night. For a long time, we drove in a full, comfortable silence, and it was the kind of silence that holds you so that at any time you can speak—you can point out a funny street name, you can say Whoa when a car zooms too quickly past you—and know the silence will be there still. It was the kind of silence you can have only with another person, and only with someone you love.
But as we drove, I was thinking not only of him but also of so many things that he didn’t know. I was thinking about what it had felt like to watch him perform the Mendelssohn solo and to see his father in the audience, about all those days he was in the hospital while we waited for him. And because I was doing that I wondered how much he was doing it too—all those things he held that I would maybe never know.
I’ve never told him what really happened with that solo. But that night in his car, his headlights illuminating all those unfamiliar roads, was the time I came the closest.
“Did your mom really want you to go to Berkeley too?” Jason asked as we went by the airport. For the past few miles, you’d been able to hear the roar of engines overhead.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She probably didn’t care as much.” She’d been noncommittal when I’d said it was my first choice.
“Ah,” Jason said. Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” came on the radio, and I wondered if Jason registered it, and whether I should change the station. It always made me think of Mr. Irving; once, he told us that when he was at Juilliard the tennis team used to blast the song during matches. Music had been following me everywhere—songs that meant something to me that I couldn’t not hear when they were playing somewhere I was—and I wondered if it was the same for him.
“One time—” I started. Maybe he heard something in my voice—Jason reached out and switched off the radio. I cleared my throat. “One time we were in Idaho with his mother for Thanksgiving,” I said, “and my mom wanted us to take family pictures for Christmas cards. It snowed, and my dad got this whole idea of writing out MERRY CHRISTMAS in binary code with rocks in this big empty field behind his parents’ house for our Christmas card picture. And then we drove all the way to Kmart so he could get me black sweats and a cap so I could lie straight and look kind of like the rocks.” It had been our best Thanksgiving: While my grandmother was still cooking and my mother was helping her, I went to the back and followed my father in a straight line with a red plastic bucket, handing him stones to place in the snow. Each time I handed him one, he would kneel and drop it carefully into place. As we went—there were seventy-two numbers, and it took nearly an hour—he explained to me how in binary everything was divisible by eight, how you could spell anything, or any number, with just ones and zeroes. And you, he’d said, craning his neck to look up at me, shielding his eyes from the sunlight, will be a number one.
“Binary code?” Jason repeated.
“It’s really long, the code. For my birthday cakes, he always wanted my candles to be in binary, and it took so many candles. MERRY CHRISTMAS was too long, actually, so he wrote MERRYXMAS instead. With no spaces.”
“Did it work?”
“He got all the pictures.” After I’d heard the shutter click, I’d stumbled in the snow trying to get to him, asking, Did it work, did it work? because he’d been worried the numbers wouldn’t all fit. “He’s a photographer, so he had a wide-angle lens, and he used real film. But then we got the pictures developed, and the last zero was supposed to be a one, and it said MERRYXMAR. He was so upset.”
I remembered that evening, the way he’d stopped short of the cashier as he rifled through the pictures, the way he’d held the picture out at arm’s length, tapping against his thigh with his other hand in multiples of eight, and then how he snapped, “Damn it,” and tossed the whole batch in the trash and handed only the receipt to the cashier.
“It’s just that he has such high standards,” I said, turning to watch out the window as streetlamps and warehouses flew by us. A few miles later, I added, “It’s why he’s so good at what he does.”
It was around Vine Street that whatever recklessness I’d felt began to wear off. What if he had moved and never told me? Or maybe there would be people there with him—maybe there would be a woman—or maybe he wouldn’t even be there at all. We drove slowly for a half mile down Schildpad, and then his complex was on the left.
“Big place,” Jason said mildly, and that was all either of us said for several minutes.
It had been over three years since I’d been here, but it looked the same—the trellis against the side wall of the leasing center, the huge carved wooden sign that functioned as a building map. I’d been worried I might get lost inside, but I remembered everything perfectly. I remembered walking up this cement pathway with smooth red rocks on either side, carrying a backpack with a change of clothing just in case he decided he wanted me to stay over. I remembered the rusty-looking playground set near the center of the complex with the fenced-in backyards all facing it and how, the first time I’d come, he’d nodded toward it as though it were something I—at fourteen—might find appealing.
We followed the main path past four buildings and then forked left as the path wound around a cluster of potted cacti and then toward building ten. The buildings were all two-story, with sliding glass doors and large windows. It had been warm that week, and many of the windows were open. There were yellowish bulbs near the roof of each building shining little overlapping circles of ligh
t on the pathway, and every now and then we’d hear a door slam, a phone ring, or someone speaking aloud. I watched for the building numbers, and I listened to Jason’s footsteps coming half a second after mine, and we rounded the corner and walked twenty more feet and suddenly there it was, brightly lit before us: my father’s home.
Jason slowed as I did. While I stood frozen in place, he cupped my elbow lightly with his palm and said, his voice low, “This one right here?”
I nodded again, and in the motion when my chin dipped toward my neck I felt strangled. We stood for a long moment with our backs to the road. When a car passed by, its lights would flash on us for a moment, almost a blink, so that for a second each time we cast long, stretched shadows on the path and on the rocks.
There were no blinds on my father’s windows and all the lights were on in the main part of the apartment inside, and you could see everything except for the bedroom and the bathroom. It looked mostly as I remembered, though in the instant I saw it I could feel a shift: a shuffling and a matching of the memory to the reality in front of me.
In the living area, there was a different TV, this one much larger, taking up nearly a third of the wall opposite the front door. There was a framed print above the small black square dining table, one I recognized from math class: an M. C. Escher print where a staircase appears to be infinite, to have no beginning and—more alarmingly—no end. There was a bowl on the table that contained two separate bananas and a green apple, each with a tiny produce sticker, and on the otherwise-empty counter in the kitchen there was a stainless steel toaster and a neat row of three cereal boxes, arranged like books on a bookshelf. And there, sitting in a black swivel chair I recognized, at his desk near the window, his face in profile angled toward his computer screen, was my father.
It had been so long that it was a physical sensation to see him there. Across my shoulders and my back, there was a burning feeling, like tiny fires roaring up and down the ravines of my spine.
“You know,” Jason said softly, “you kind of look like him.”
My father was playing a game I didn’t recognize. He looked like maybe he’d gained weight; there was a new padding around his jaw and cheekbones. His hairline had receded a little, his buzz cut forming a peak. In the light of his computer monitor, he looked ghostly and bluish, and—perhaps this is fitting—this is the way he always appears in my memory, too: absorbed in something only he sees, tinged with a cool, clinical light.
Jason cleared his throat. In my peripheral vision, I saw him stick his hands in his pockets. “You want to go in?” he asked, and I said, “I’m not sure.”
On the way here, I’d pictured knocking, going right in, but my nerve had dissipated seeing him, and my image of how this was going to go had evaporated. My phone was warm and heavy in my pocket, pressed against my thigh. I could call him, I thought, and I reached down and took the phone in my hand. I could dial his number and watch through this window as he answered my call.
My father glanced up, and for a moment I thought he saw us. Jason stepped swiftly to the side, out of sight of the window, and I felt all the blood drain from my head. My heart pounded. What on earth would I say?
But my father held his gaze there without reaction, and I realized he was just thinking, letting his eyes wander the way he did sometimes when he played. My heart paused and slowed in all its rocketing.
Jason murmured, “For a second there, I thought he saw us.”
“I did too.”
I felt, still, a little out of breath. But why were we standing here, why had I agreed to come, if that wasn’t what I wanted: to be seen by him? Surely, I thought, neither of us had wanted this: standing out here in the dark, watching so silently he’d never realize that I’d come. And when it had seemed he might see us, only Jason had moved: I had stayed put. Almost before I knew what I’d done, I’d pulled my phone out.
“You calling him?” Jason asked. I think, for whatever reason, he was startled. And I could have stopped there; I could have said no, and slipped the phone back away. But I said, “Yes,” and with that I spoke my action into existence. I was dialing, and then I was listening to the hollow, high-pitched ringing. My heart was pounding.
Through the window, I watched my father take his phone from his pocket and study it—maybe he’d gotten a new phone and hadn’t yet entered his contacts, I thought—and then he balanced it between his neck and shoulder, his head tilted. “Hello?”
It was that same voice, that voice I knew, and as soon as he spoke, all the edges and corners of the world around me dimmed and softened into something not quite real; I wasn’t quite inside with him, but I wasn’t outside like this either, hidden in the dark. As though I were caught in a spell, my whole body turned to something like cotton—I felt diaphanous and weightless, unrooted.
“Hi, Dad,” I said. In the quiet, my voice sounded unnaturally loud and high-pitched. “It’s—it’s Beth.”
“Beth?” His whole body straightened as he sat up, and something in me thrilled at that reaction: that his very spine responded to me, that the connection resonated through him so visibly.
“I know this is last-minute,” I said. “But I’m in your area, and I thought—well, I thought maybe I could stop by and say hello. Just for a minute.”
“You’re in the area?” he repeated. Through the window, my father shrugged his shoulders quickly a few times and then twisted his wrists in small circles, and then he brought his hands back to his keyboard. And the familiarity of those gestures, how completely I knew them, how I even felt them sometimes as my own: they wrecked me. We shared these things, I wanted to tell him, and my throat swelled. We shared these things and so much more, and everything could be all right again; all this time, through everything, I had waited for him.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m really close by.”
“Well—unfortunately, I’m working late at the office tonight.”
Jason heard; he sucked in his breath, and when I looked down his hands were clenched.
“Oh,” I said, my voice coming out tinny. “Are you—are you sure?”
“Yes, but thank you for calling,” my father said. Through the window, I saw him lean forward and peer at his screen, his fingers flying across his keyboard. He was doing that thing he always did when he was playing when his answers came just a split second delayed. “But let’s set a date for soon. All right? We’ll have dinner. And keep me posted on Berkeley.”
“All right,” I managed.
When he hung up, it broke that spell that had been buoying me, and I remembered myself, and where we were, which was outside and in the dark. My imagination was doused with images: of myself banging on his door or barging through it, of my father flooded with guilt to know that I’d watched him in his lie. I would go in, I thought wildly, and he’d have to rectify it somehow, he’d have to welcome me, I’d go in and he’d be filled with grief at the way I was feeling, at the way he’d made me feel for years, and he would finally—finally!—understand what I needed from him.
I was breathing fast, my hands trembling. And then from a neighboring home there were two quick sounds: an infant screeching, and over the sound of a faucet a woman calling, “Matt? Can you check on the baby?” And I realized in that moment there was nothing to stop me from knocking. There had never been. I could stand outside and shout things to my father through the single-paned glass, I could call and leave him messages, I could write him letters and drop them in the mail. I could learn the bus routes and come here every single day if I wanted to, and I could tell him I was here now. My father couldn’t stop me from doing any of those things.
But I hadn’t done them. And seeing him here like this, absorbed in his screen as I waited outside, I understood how there are parts of yourself—segments you can measure by time or by depth, by how long or how strongly they were a part of you—that you can’t take back once you’ve offered them to someone who’s made it so clear he never wanted them.
I was crying; my tears h
ad spilled over too far for me to pretend they weren’t there, and I reached up to wipe my eyes. “Let’s just go,” I said. My voice shook.
Jason nodded. He extended a hand toward the path, gesturing for me to go ahead. As he followed me, he placed his hand on the small of my back. I closed my eyes as we walked and hoped I would stumble, or collide with a wall, but nothing happened; Jason kept his hand there, and I stayed on the path.
But as we came back to the main courtyard, just before we turned the corner to reach the parking lot, Jason lifted his foot and kicked, a heavy slam of a kick, just past the walkway so that a landscaped pile of pocked red stones went flying. It startled me—in the stillness, the rocks skittering were very loud.
As I jerked back, my heart thudding and a few stray rocks still spinning like tops on the concrete, Jason breathed and said, I think to himself, so quietly I almost didn’t hear, “That fucking bastard.”
* * *
That night we went, of course, was before I’d ever lived in an apartment of my own, before I even knew anyone else who had. And at the time I’d always felt there was something almost glamorous about apartments, and for a long time my father’s seemed a sort of daring zenith in my mind.
But now there are different things that stand out to me: how the fruit on his table and the cereal on his counter were so precisely the kind of groceries you buy when you live alone; how the couch was the kind of thing you buy at IKEA right out of college, cheap and white, because you don’t think about how easily and how permanently it picks up stains, all those marks of your days you don’t notice until they’ve built up over time.
At the time I didn’t quite understand Jason’s reaction, though I wasn’t unmoved by it. I understood, of course, that Jason knew what it was to stand before a father to whom you find you cannot speak, and—even then—I think I understood how maybe, for him, that night wasn’t only about me.
When We Were Infinite Page 27
