As an infant, Pete didn’t babble. Pete didn’t babble, he didn’t burble, he didn’t produce the adorable spit-bubbly strings of “bababab” and “dadadadada” that erupted from the other tykes we knew. When his peers started saying “bowwow!” at every dog that passed, Pete would smile silently, his dark eyes lit up, but he wouldn’t contribute a “bowwow” of his own, no matter how many times I read Go Dog Go, pointed at each dog, and said “bowwow.” Expressive dysphasia was diagnosed at five.
Now, at sixteen, he usually alternated between surly and silent, and homework rarely happened without a scramble for lost handouts. His teachers asked him to complete extra vocabulary worksheets—he was now a high school junior with standardized tests dead ahead. “I don’t give a shit what ‘exigent’ means,” he’d mutter.
Ms. Vong, in a pair of red-framed glasses and bold asymmetrical jewelry, tilted her head empathetically as we walked in, looking up from a folder opened on her desk. “Good day, Dennis, and good day, Abigail!”
Settled in chairs opposite. Dennis rested his hand on mine, then gave me a quizzical glance—mine was trembling. I pulled it away.
“Pete has come a long way with us, I have been so gratified with his progress.” She sighed, in an apologetic fashion. “So, what brings us here today.” She passed her fingers over the open folder again, as if reading Braille. “Being so bright, as Pete is, but lacking that facility to express yourself. Struggling with the dysphasia. And”—she glanced down at the open file—“dyslexia as well?” She shook her head gently, smiled at each of us carefully, in turn. “Must be very frustrating for him, even more now at this transitional age.”
Clearly, it would be worse than we feared.
“Perhaps that is why he has written graffiti in the boys’ room espousing violent revolution,” she said. She looked down at her folder and read, “The fires of the Antifa will blaze forever.” “Dax Lives.” “Avenge Killah P.” She looked up at us.
“Kill a pee?” said Dennis.
“Killah.” She glared. “Like a killer. Followed by the letter ‘P.’”
“At least he has a passion,” said Dennis.
“He’s such a gentle boy,” I said. “He’s never been violent.”
“Perhaps not,” she said. “But that brings me to the next issue. We believe he’s been involved with these gruesome situations in the trash cans too.” She fiddled with her trapezoidal earrings. “I’m afraid we have no definitive proof, but on the day of the spring sing, he was seen icing his hand with a frozen fruit bar. And he has been influencing other students. Well, one other student. And I can’t have this spread any further.”
“The other student, who’s that?” said Dennis.
“Dmitri Petimezas.” She drew out this name, as if its many hard consonants tasted delicious in her mouth, but her face betrayed nothing.
“He’s the instigator,” said Dennis. “I’m sure of it.”
She shook her head, just slightly. “He confessed that Pete created the graffiti. And your son admitted it.” She picked up the phone and pressed a button. “Lucy, send Pete Willard in, please.” She hung up. “We’ve had him reading in Ms. Finch’s room, just down the hall.”
Dennis took my hand.
Pete shuffled in, avoiding our eyes, a finger stuck in the pages of The Grapes of Wrath.
“We will work with you,” Vong said. “But first, I must impose a suspension. A week to cool off. Given the volatility of it all. I’m sure you understand.”
LATER. ON MY PHONE IN THE DARK KITCHEN, I pecked out a long text about it, poured out my worries. Pete has been suspended; he’s espousing revolution. And, as usual, a little spike in my pulse as I saw his name come up, a response. He is an intelligent boy; he will figure things out. Who doesn’t have challenges in this world? Do you know, I have dyslexia myself, Abby, undiagnosed until my thirties. Apply yourself, my teachers would say. That was me at Pete’s age.
I would really like to see you, he added. Just say when and where.
Then a postscript: And tell Pete to be careful. It’s kid stuff now, but you never know who’s surveilling.
ABBY, MARCH 19, 2015
For three weeks, Benjamin had been insistent: I did not see him on Fifth Avenue kissing a girl. “That wasn’t me,” he protested. “I was at track practice.” Last night, he had dropped a basketball down the stairs; at the bottom, it leaped up and cracked the window next to the front door.
He said this while shoveling handfuls from a bag of finely shredded mozzarella cheese into his mouth. Little bits snagged on his sweatshirt or tumbled to the floor.
“I was saving that to make pizza.”
“I like Santo’s better. Can we order instead?” Benjamin looked a lot like Dennis, as I first saw him. The irresistible sunny looks. The large green-hazel eyes, impressive width of shoulder. Wheat-colored hair with a vibrant wave to it. Skin that easily soaked up a tan.
Pete looked like me. Finely boned, pale and prone to sunburn, wide-set dark umber eyes. It was two days into his suspension. I climbed the stairs to his room, where he’d been battened down, not leaving except for meals.
In the narrow hallway, I passed the shelves of books and the black bird painting, and the sketches of Dennis and me, when we’d done our turn at modeling for Mariah Glücksburg. Likely our most valuable possessions at this point.
When we’d arrived home after the visit with Vong, we’d cornered Pete. He admitted he’d become involved with something called The Brigade. “It’s about solidarity and social change, and I’ve just been to a couple of meetings. It’s nothing for you to worry about. It’s not your business.”
“Solidarity with who?” I said. “We are your parents. Everything that is your business is our business, as long as you live in this house.”
“That’s simply not true,” Pete had said.
It cost us two and a half vacation days each, Dennis and I, to stay home with our teenage miscreant. I guess we may not get out to Tustin this year, Dennis had said sadly.
Now I knocked and opened Pete’s door.
“What,” he glowered. He sat in bed, his laptop balanced atop his knees, headphones on. With a sharp, raised shoulder, he nudged one side of the headphone askew.
“We’re ordering Santo’s for dinner. Pepperoni?”
“Can I go to paintball with Dmitri and his brother Milo again this weekend?”
“Hell no,” I snapped. “Not happening.” I glowered at him. “What’s the deal with these people. That Dmitri is a menace,” I said. “And the brother—what’s his story?”
“I think he sells, like, imported things,” Pete shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Imported things?” I shook my head. “Like cocaine?”
He rolled his eyes then stared down at his screen. “Pepperoni,” he said gruffly. Then added, “Please.” Pete always said please and thank you—this was a point of pride for him.
Thirty-two minutes later, we unboxed a square pizza that stretched halfway across the dining table, a pocked battlefield of tomato sauce and oozing cheese, cratered with pepperoni. Choosing their first slices, the boys leaned over it like strategizing generals. Benjamin said his English homework was to write down a true story. “I want to do the crash of the B-2 Bomber.”
“It was an F-4 Phantom,” corrected Dennis. He chewed his slice thoughtfully. “Thirty-eight foot wingspan, silver fuselage. The size of that wreckage in the field behind the school, tremendous. And the horse. That lonely horse. Every afternoon, I fed him my leftover lunch. I’ll never understand why he didn’t run. He just stood there. I watched the whole thing, we all did, because it was recess. We heard the engine sputtering. And did I ever tell you this? Mrs. Perry, that was my third-grade teacher, she said, pray for him, that poor animal is burning, she said, as we stood there and watched it.”
“The pilot got away?” Benjamin asked.
“He ejected,” said Pete, with an air of authority.
“Yes, but of course we didn’t know that at th
e time. And we didn’t care. We only cared about the horse.” Dennis always sighed at this point in the oft-told tale, and said, “The sound of the crash was something. Like the final ten seconds of the world.” In my mind, this was the origin story of every artwork he’d ever made.
I needed to talk with him about the incident with Benjamin on Fifth Avenue, about what we should do about Pete, his political experiments, the trouble at school. I needed to talk to him about the sightings, and yes, the correspondence with the detective, give it all some air, let go of secrecy. But perhaps I’d do it tomorrow instead. For tonight, it was fine, I decided, just to be with him and with our two best creations. Beloved humans, chairs creaking under their weight, locked down by gravity, grounded in space and time. Of course, yes, they’re the ghosts of tomorrow. They will be supplanted by newer and older versions of themselves. But at this moment they are just exactly and only here, and they are my real and my now.
ABBY, MARCH 26, 2015
Seven days pass, with antifa videos tromping through my late nights, and during the day, I tried to focus on the particulars—packing Benjamin’s favorite cream cheese and jelly sandwiches in his lunch, fetching dry cleaning for Dennis, showing up for work on time and paying attention at meetings. I tried to respond coolly to all communications from the detective. Any way you looked at it, I told myself, it was unwise.
I had some success in corralling my errant mind. But I failed to banish her. She has quit her job. Her life stretches before her. Staring out the window during one of those meetings to which I’ve pledged my full attention, I longed to see her again. Glimpse her, if just for a final time. Certainly, this odd happenstance would end soon. It wasn’t going to last. How could it? And I recalled one of her most frequent haunts.
And on this particular Thursday evening, she is there, haunting it. The Corner Bistro, a place for generations of young strivers, offering cheap burgers and beers and a crushed, cozy proximity with one’s tribe. Sitting on a stool wedged between the battered wood bar and the front window. The day’s last light outlines her profile in gold. The Stones are playing: I am just living to be lying by your side. She is sketching in a notebook. I take a stool next to her. She glances up at me, then turns to the paper again. She is drawing a hand. A male hand. When I see it, I feel my own hands turn to ice.
I know that hand, I say.
She shrugs. Could be anyone’s.
No. That is someone’s, I say.
She nods slightly and breaks into a small smile. And are you in love?
I have love in my life.
Her pencil, moving in the white space.
And are you painting? she says.
I’m trying.
You need to, she says. She meets my gaze at last. Because to create beauty and meaning, to make something that has never existed before . . . I’m sure that is worth more than anything.
The Stones have stopped and Coltrane scolds us with his horn.
It seems like people lose that so easily. I don’t want you to lose it. Her voice quavers.
He’s not good for you, I say. Maybe trying to send the conversation in a different direction.
She turns the page in her sketchbook, lips curving into another small smile. He’s my poison of choice. Best drug ever.
The drugs are where the trouble begins, I say. Why not save yourself the heartache. I hate to feel the maternal impulse bleeding in here, but I do. I hear it in these blurted words. I feel it in my gut as I recall searching under the bed for a lost earring, a silver hoop, searching for it in dim dawn light and finding a shoebox of paraphernalia instead. Smoke-darkened glass, a lighter, bits of foil and paper and two glinting needles rolling around the bottom. I didn’t know the specifics—I was afraid to ask. I put it out of my mind and focused instead on the intoxications he supplied to me, the matchless high of his regard.
The way things happened is how it must be, I remind myself. To bring me here. The course is set. The path is determined.
I couldn’t possibly live without him, she says, as if she’s just seen my thoughts on a passing billboard. She stands and extracts a wallet from her bag, drops a few dollars onto the table.
My treat, I say, pushing the bills toward her.
She shrugs and pockets the money, rips her sketch from her notebook and leaves it on the table. You seem stuck, she says. I think you need to make a change. Get your head straight. Maybe call this person. I used to see her, but I’m done.
She slings her bag over her shoulder. You need to get your head straight, she says.
She leaves, but there is the paper on the bar. The hands of Eli. On the flip side, she has written a name and a number.
SESSION NOTES
* * *
No-show, again. Apparent termination without notice.
Dr. Tristane Kazemy, MARCH 30, 2016
The scans, again. The brain looked clean, normal. But one must bear in mind that meningioma can remain undetectable for years. A node, a tiny cyst or calcification, tucked discreetly in a sulcus, pressing against an important structure, can disrupt. The tiny hidden pea, she sometimes thought of it, recalling the illustration, the lovely maiden in red braids prone atop the tower of mattresses, in Maman’s tattered translation of Hans Christian Andersen, bought almost sixty years ago in a bookstall in Tabriz.
No one could see the pea. Yet its presence deprived the princess of happiness.
She spent time each week simply gazing, in between teaching, diagnostic rounds, departmental meetings. The MRIs, the CATs, the 3D angiography. Finally, she showed the scans to Buccardi. He’d peered at them briefly and said they appeared clean. “But perhaps show them to Laurin,” he said. “You know he has the eye. Besides, how much longer can you keep swiping the screen every time he walks by?” He winked. “Sooner or later, he will want to mix in.”
“I just want to fully inhabit this first.”
Buccardi nodded. “I understand, Tristane. This is your get.”
She knew that Buccardi and Laurin, her superiors, had conferred about how she’d been spending her hours. She was, it was true, stealing the lab’s time for this off-the-record situation. And how did she come by this case, and who was paying for this time she spent? She saw them, spooning sugar into their petite cups, the sidelong glances as she approached. Laurin was proud of the lab’s new espresso machine. She made it clear that she would stay loyal to her Earl Grey.
4/4/4/4
ABBY, APRIL 6, 2015
Spring came wafting into town one night while we were all asleep. Trees bristled with buds one morning, and then the next, it seemed, were blossoming with slutty abandon. Rushing to work and home again, I tried to catch their fragrance as I dashed by.
This evening, I detoured to walk through the gardens in front of Rockefeller Center. All the years I’ve lived in New York, I have never missed seeing the tulips in bloom there. Flowers are a mundane obsession for an artist. But they lure me.
Above the buildings, the sun’s last rays strobed on fast-moving clouds. People leaned over the rows of red and yellow and white blooms, bowing and waving as the tulips did the same.
I found a bench, sat next to my big work-stuffed bag. I unzipped my boot slightly and rubbed my cramped calf. Would I be able to get a seat on the subway home? Red frilled tulips shivered. My gaze wandered over them then came to rest on a couple leaning on the rail surrounding the flower beds. The woman, the unruly honey-hued hair.
The unmistakable pointy chin above the fake fur collar of her coat. The man faces away—but of course, I know who it is. She leans against him, and her hand is under his scuffed suede jacket, going up and down his back. I can see it moving under the fabric, a buried rhythm, like the bass line of a complex piece of music.
The couple turns and stares up at the buildings, seeming to discuss something they see up there. Behind them, a row of white tulips flicker in the breeze, foam on a fast-falling stream.
She looks so happy. I have forgotten the feeling that inspired that look. Deep,
fresh infatuation. Straight from the wrapper, fresh from the source. Her smile astounds me. How long has it been since I smiled that way, so that my soul haloed around me, practically visible?
Then, though it is hard, so searingly hard, my eyes focus on him. So it is not scary enough that I should be haunted by myself. Now him too.
But I want to look. I want to see. My eyes, my hardworking-mom-and-wife eyes, feast on the boy in a way that, in a more evolved part of my brain, horrifies. Because this kid is what—twenty-three or -four?
But I look at him, half a head taller than her, long dark lashes, dark brows, straight brown hair flipping over his ears, strong cheekbones, strong nose, something watchful, hopeful, and slightly blurred in that face, a face out of a Manet painting, something classical and eternal about it. I gaze at him, and the buried river overflows its banks. I allow myself to remember, bits of him rising up through my mind like bones resurfacing in the flood, his clouded smile, the camera in a beat-up leather sheath, the apartment outfitted with a wooden wire-spool table and folding patio chairs and a shelf filled with pulpy old noir novels and philosophy books. My oddest Christmas ever, spent in the drafty, sprawling East Village apartment of his parents and his childhood, overlooking a snow-swept Tompkins Square, sitting around a spread of deli containers with his father, the alcoholic high school history teacher, and his mother, a masseuse who kept an array of electric sex toys on the kitchen counter next to the coffee maker. She threw tarot for us and told me my fate was bound up with her son’s, you will draw your last breaths together, she said.
When I met him, he was working two jobs, as a waiter at a Marriott in Midtown and doing paste-up at a disreputable classifieds newspaper. The night we met, he told me he’d been carrying three plates of cream cake across the ballroom when Rabbi Meir Kahane was shot a few feet in front of him. He kept a bloodied polyester napkin tucked in a plastic bag in his closet. He showed it to me the third time I slept over. After we’d been fucking for around a month, he admitted that he’d been dabbling in various street drugs, had been for years, but always under control, he said, and he never shared needles, and he was in the process of kicking. He had plans, he said. Witnessing that assassination had awakened a desire in him, a thirst to be close to bloodshed and action, and to photograph it. He had that old camera, inherited from his Ukrainian grandfather, a Red Army photographer who used it to document the Battle of the Dnieper. He was aiming to become a Robert Capa. He would venture to war-torn places. And you too, he said, to be an artist you have to see everything, he said. In the meantime, he’d bought a police scanner and snapped photos around the city, pedestrian deaths, murder scenes, occasionally selling a shot to one of the tabloids. He used the darkroom at his paste-up job and earned extra cash for film by picking up an occasional bartending shift. Down at the bar where we first met.
You Again Page 7
