by Sue Miller
Sam smiled at his friend. Shut up, Sam, he thought. “Yeah,” he said. “Anyway, I’m smitten.” That was it, wasn’t it? As simple as that.
“Well, congratulations. On having what must be one of the best feelings in the world.”
“It sure is.” He had a swallow of beer and set his glass down. “But why is it, do you think?”
“I’m sure it’s chemical. Brain stuff. But don’t knock it.” He’d been fooling around with the cardboard coaster, and now it rolled a little way down the bar toward Sam. Jerry looked up quickly. “You’ve slept with her?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Ah!” He nodded, sagely. “Well, wait and see.”
“I think I know.”
“Yeah, wait and see.”
Sam watched the bartender for a few moments as he mixed a drink, then poured it from his shaker, green and foaming, into a martini glass. A tall young woman in a mannish business suit carried it off. He turned to Jerry again. “What do you think it is—are we crazy?—that we can still be talking about this stuff, about dating and infatuation, at fifty, going on fifty-five? It seems wrong, somehow.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t seem … adult.”
“You’re a guy who worries about that too much.”
“Is that a diagnosis?”
“I don’t think you can fall in love if you’re worried about it, that’s all.”
“Maybe I don’t want to fall in love.”
“Why wouldn’t you? Are you kidding me?”
Sam didn’t answer.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I am. Kidding. I think.” And then it occurred to him—was this why he had wanted to talk to Jerry?—“I don’t think she does, actually.”
“She doesn’t want to fall in love?”
“Yeah. She was saying something to me about not having wanted me to come to her house, or to come to mine. Something about just not wanting to get that close.”
“Funny thing to say to a new lover.”
“I’m not a lover.”
“Yeah, well. You know what I mean.” Behind him at the bar, a couple of girls were shrieking with laughter. He looked over at them. He turned back to Sam again and frowned. “It could be it’s the 9/11 stuff. The boyfriend that died.”
“Gus, you mean?”
“Is he the guy?”
Sam nodded.
“That could certainly do it,” Jerry said. “You love someone and he dies. Violently. Notoriously. Conspicuously. That could make you a bit … hesitant, one would think, about intimacy.”
They pondered this. Sam had been trying to avoid his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar, but the bartender had moved away now, and there he was, looking back at himself, a middle-aged guy.
“I’m thinking maybe she didn’t love him,” he said.
“What would make you think that?”
He turned away from himself to Jerry again. “She said they had, I think, difficulties. And then there’s the play.” He shrugged. “The guy who isn’t sorry that his wife might be dead.”
“A play is a play. You think Shakespeare killed everyone who died in his plays? Or wanted them dead?”
“No. Okay.”
They moved on, they talked about the Celtics game Jerry was about to see. They talked about Leona, his wife, who ran special programs at the BPL and was mad at the mayor and the city about funding. They talked about the mayor, they tried to remember how long he’d been in office. They tried to figure out who might run against him in the next election. When was the next election? Neither of them knew.
They finished their beers, and Jerry said he had to go. As they were pulling their wallets out, Sam said, “I think I’m right about the intimacy thing, though.”
He walked Jerry to the subway at Park Street, and they embraced, whumping each other on the back, an embrace that was also a parody of an embrace. He watched his friend go down the stairs, and then he turned and made his way west on Boylston Street. He was going to walk a bit, he’d told Jerry. At Charles Street, he went right, and halfway up the block, he turned in at the gateway to the Public Garden.
It was dark and still, the flower beds barren, put away for the winter. The grand trees loomed heavily, even bare of leaves. He moved unhurriedly through, listening to his own footsteps, passing only two other walkers. He crossed the bridge over the duck pond where they’d taken the kids on the Swan Boats when they were still small enough to find that exciting.
He came out through the gate onto the busy street, facing the Ritz. The Taj, it was now. He crossed Arlington and started down Newbury Street. He was thinking over the conversation with Jerry, the part about Billy. Unkind, he’d called what Leslie did. Maybe he meant the fact that she did it without warning him, without explaining to him what she was doing.
But would he have gone if she had? Wouldn’t he have thought it sounded like a bad idea, wouldn’t he have invented some excuse? He passed the storefronts, the bars with their perpetual Christmas lights, not looking, lost in thought.
He would have found a way to say no, if he’d been warned, he was pretty sure of that. He would have chosen not to meet Billy.
Sam circled twice by the Delta baggage area, and then there he was, Jack, tall, too thin, his mother’s long, lovely face translated into something gaunt and hollowed on him. His grin was a surprise in this face; it transformed him—added pounds, made him merry. He had one bag, familiar to Sam, a worn old L. L. Bean thing he’d been hauling around for years.
He was in the car before Sam could get out, so they had an awkward embrace turned slightly sideways to each other in the front seats. Jack had about a two-day beard. This was a necessity—he got a rash if he shaved too often. Or this used to be the case. What did Sam know of his life now? At any rate, it scraped a bit when their cheeks touched.
Jack put on his seat belt, and they pulled out of the parking area. Driving into Boston, they talked about how the flight had been, about the weekend conference. Jack gave a report on Mark, the youngest brother, who was newly married and working in New York, in a job neither of them fully understood, on Wall Street. Sam told Jack about some of his cousins, the ones he’d seen at the big family Thanksgiving dinner at Susan’s sister’s house. He’d started going again after the divorce from Claire, occasionally with one of his sons. He’d gone alone this year.
Jack shook his head. “Why are they all so fucking accomplished?” he asked.
“We only hear about the ones that are. Not a word was dropped about Jenna, for instance. She’s probably … a dope fiend.”
Jack grinned again. “Brian. Brian … weighs four hundred pounds.”
“Elaine got married to a bookie,” Sam said. “A small-time bookie.”
After a moment, Jack said, “I’m wondering if there is such a thing as a big-time bookie?” Sam laughed.
They agreed to stop at the house so Jack could wash up, brush his teeth, “et cetera,” and then the plan was to drive out to Waltham, to an Italian restaurant they both loved.
As they pulled into the driveway, the sensor lights came on and flooded the car with light. “Here we are,” Jack said. His face, half in shadow, half in light, looked suddenly older.
“Here is where we are,” Sam answered. He cut the engine.
Jack opened his door. The cold night air touched Sam, and he got out, too. Single file, they moved across the paving stones from the driveway to the front door. Sam found the key on his jangling ring and put it in the lock. They stepped inside.
Jack dropped his bag and started to take his coat off. “Same,” he said, looking around. “Same, same, same. It’s like the museum of my youth.”
“Why not?” Sam said. “It was quite a youth.”
Jack made a face and then headed up the stairs, taking them two at a time. “Three shakes,” he called back.
Only then did Sam let himself look at the phone. Steady green. No news there. He heard water running somewhere deep in the walls of the house. He went
into his office, leaving the doors open behind him—the hall door to the long corridor, the office door at the end of it. He’d been running some computer programs on the library project, looking at the angle of the sun through the windows at various times of the year. He started to print some of these out.
Jack appeared in the office after about ten minutes. He came and stood at Sam’s desk, where the elevations were spread out. “This looks cool, Dad,” he said.
“Well, it’s okay,” Sam answered, looking over.
“What, you don’t think it’s cool?”
“Do people still say ‘cool’?”
Jack glanced at him sternly. “Apparently so.”
“I guess I’d have to say that. That I don’t, think it’s so cool.”
“But why not?”
“Well, they wanted a certain look, and I had to promise it to them to get the job, essentially.” He was thinking of the campus, the boring buildings. A few of the older ones, Victorian heaps of brick and bric-a-brac, had some character, if not beauty. But the newer ones, built in the fifties and sixties—dorms, mostly, and a science building—were gelded versions of those old eccentricities. And in spite of what the committee said about originality, about breaking new ground, that was what they wanted more of. The same. Slightly more distinctive, perhaps, and Sam was providing that with the fenestration on the first floor and the echoing trim above. But he knew that the reason they’d given him the job was because he wasn’t going to try to do too much.
“So you compromised or something.”
“Something, anyway. But that’s partly what architecture is. Not an art. Not pure in that sense. You’re always responsible to a client. A client’s taste or ideas.”
“But sometimes you push beyond that, don’t you?”
“Sometimes. For me, mostly now in the really small, private jobs, oddly.” He raised his hands to make quotation marks with his fingers and said, “‘A dazzling, unique-if-not-sculptural laundry and rec room off the kitchen.’”
Jack laughed, quickly.
“I suppose if I’m honest about it I’d have to say I’m not a big-enough name—or talent, let’s be clear—to be offered the opportunity to do bold, brave work on a large scale.”
“God, you’re depressing me, Dad. Don’t say this stuff.”
“I don’t mean to. I like my work. I’m really not interested in that other, glory stuff, actually. Cal was.” Cal was his partner. “But Cal didn’t make it either, in that sense.”
They were quiet a minute, and then Jack said, “I’ve never heard you talk this way before.”
“I’m just being honest. Architecture is like most other things, maybe like science, even, in that there are a few people who are world beaters. Really, just a few.” He picked up the sun studies and tapped them into a neat pile. “And then there are the rest of us. I’m good. Lots better than lots of others. I’m just not in the world-beating business.”
“But weren’t you, once?”
“Nah. I think I just didn’t ever really think about it, once.”
This wasn’t true. As a very young man, he had thought hard about it. He wanted it. Maybe up until Susan had the recurrence, he still thought it was possible—some kind of distinction, some kind of public acclaim. After that he lost heart for it. But by then the world had changed. The idealism of the early seventies had faded, and he’d stopped believing in architecture the way he once had, in any case—believing that it could have an impact socially or culturally or politically because of the way it arranged people’s lives physically. The world just seemed more intractable, he supposed.
“Why?” He turned to Jack, smiling at him. “Did you think I was a world beater?”
“I suppose so.”
“Well, you’re a good son.”
Sam put his hand on Jack’s back, and together they walked to the door. He switched the light off as they left, and they headed down the corridor.
“So when do you think you changed, Dad? The way you felt about your work?” Jack was walking ahead of him, a tall silhouette.
“I don’t know. I think it might have been when your mother was ill, and I … sort of became a kind of mom myself. My own inadequate version of a housewife. That just seemed more important to me than the work I was doing at the time. Plus it would have been hard to be trying to do both things.”
In the hall, they lifted their coats from the newel post and put them on. Sam said, “Sometimes when I meet ambitious people now, people who are really absorbed in their work—like you—I feel a kind of envy.” This was true of Jack, but he suddenly thought of Billy, too—Billy saying, “God, I love the theater.” What he’d thought at that moment, what he’d imagined he might say to Billy at some point, was that she was like a man in that regard, in her passion for her work, and he was like a woman in relation to his, each attitude probably the result of a long, complicated personal history around the issue. He knew his was, anyway.
“Nah, it’s not exactly envy, what I feel,” he corrected himself as they went outside. “It’s admiration. Not envy. I’m not even sure I’d want that kind of devotion to my work. And not having it sure made it easier for me to do what I had to do when your mother was sick. When she died.” He thought of what Charley had said of him after Susan had died. Of how angry Jack had been. “Not that it meant I did a great job, I’m not saying that.”
Just as they were getting into the car, Jack said, “We weren’t easy, Dad.”
“You had reason enough not to be.”
The restaurant was packed, so they had to wait for a table, shouting back and forth at each other as they stood in the bar with drinks. Over dinner, they talked about pets. Jack had said he was thinking of getting a dog. He was sick of living alone. They discussed breeds and sizes, they talked about the two dogs the boys had as kids—one a biter that they kept anyway, the boys loved him so much. They talked about what would be fair to the dog, Jack was gone for such long hours. Several times Sam was tempted to say something about Billy. You know, I’ve started to see this woman, and she has an enormous dog, maybe even relaying the story of her sprained wrist. He didn’t, in the end. He recognized he wasn’t sure enough about any part of it to beckon Jack’s attention to it.
As they drove back to Boston, Sam was suddenly washed with happiness purely on account of Jack. That Jack should have come to visit him, that they should be in a car going anywhere together, talking idly and easily, seemed like a kind of miracle to him.
For Jack was the child who had been the most unmoored by his mother’s death. He was ten at the time, and though he was bright—Sam thought probably the brightest of the three—he pretty much stopped working in school except when he really liked a teacher. He often didn’t turn up at dinner. In the last years of high school, he started to stay out all night sometimes, without telling anyone where he would be. When he was home, he kept the door to his room closed, usually locked. Even so, you could smell the dope seeping out when you passed it.
“You’ve got to do something about him,” Claire told Sam over and over as Jack turned fifteen, and then sixteen. But what could Sam do if Jack simply wouldn’t follow the rules, wouldn’t accept punishment, wouldn’t change, wouldn’t see anything wrong with the life he was leading?
He had been furious when Sam married Claire—this, in spite of his seeming withdrawal from Sam and any kind of life at home with him and his brothers. He was fourteen at the time. He made clear in the next few years how little he liked her. After he went away to college—far away, to California—he always had an excuse not to come back, even though Sam and Claire were divorced his freshman year: the length of the trip, a friend whose house he was invited to for a holiday, a good summer job out there. He was home for one Christmas break during these years. Otherwise, it was Sam who made the trips across the country, seven or eight times in all, to visit with his son, to see how he was doing.
And then, in his midtwenties, Jack moved back east to go to graduate school. He started to
call or e-mail fairly regularly. He seemed to welcome Sam’s visits to him, he voluntarily came to Boston to see Sam from time to time. He appeared to be at peace—even happy. He had work he loved. He had an apartment, occasionally a girlfriend. And Sam, who felt he’d had nothing to do with any of that, was only grateful.
Jack fell asleep on the way home, his head lolling, his knees relaxed and dropped open. As he looked over at his son, Sam was remembering him, remembering all of them, as little boys, their sleeping selves part of their beauty. He thought of Susan then, too, he had a sudden sharp, clear picture of her as a beautiful, healthy woman, a young mother. He remembered her riding in the car, coming home from some family outing. She was in the passenger seat holding the baby, Mark, against her breast. The two older boys were in their striped sleeping bags in the back of the station wagon—no such thing as required car seats then. Mark had been nursing, and he’d fallen asleep, too. Sam and Susan were talking softly, singing along with the radio, and then they fell silent.
After a while, Sam realized he was the only one awake. He could hear their slow breathing, all of them all around him, as though the space itself were inhaling and exhaling. He looked over at the baby and Susan. Her still-intact breast was partly exposed, her chin rested against the baby’s head. He had in quick succession a sense of prideful joy in being the protector, the one who would guide them all safely home, and then terror at this very notion. For a moment he felt completely inadequate to the task. He felt like a boy.
Jack woke now, yawning, stretching, groaning.
Sam asked if he was going to see anyone while he was in town. He had friends from high school who came over occasionally when he was home, guys who’d been in his wild, lost group of boys then, and seemed, like him, to have recovered. Though Sam supposed he just didn’t see the ones who hadn’t made it.
No, Jack said. He wouldn’t have time. He started to talk about the conference the next day. He’d have to be there by eight, which meant, for him, getting up about six-thirty. And he’d stay on through the cocktail reception afterward. “It’s supposed to end at six, but I bet there are people hanging around even later than that. But I could meet you somewhere at about seven or so. Want to do something afterward?”
