Northwest Corner

by John Burnham Schwartz

  “I agree with you, Pen.”

  “I was looking at him last night, the son you almost never mention and who I had no reason whatever to believe was in town. In your house. A lot of history there—I could feel it without any help from you. And you know what? You’re hardly better than a liar. I’ve realized that I don’t really know you at all.”

  “That’s not true. You know more about me than anybody else around here.”

  “Which isn’t saying a whole lot.”

  “I don’t know, but if you were me—”

  “If I were you?” Penny leans into the counter till she’s inches from my face, her hazel eyes moist but on fire. “If I were you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I wouldn’t be committed enough or brave enough or engaged enough to actually tell you, another person with another person’s needs and feelings, what I really think. What I care about. What the real story is. What I’m just willing to—just to, to bring to the fucking table of human relations.”

  “Point taken.”

  “It isn’t a point, you asshole.” Her eyes well up and she pivots and walks to the sink, where a pile of dirty breakfast dishes can be seen tilting toward the coast. I think she’s going to say more, but instead she turns on the faucet. A squirt of soap on a sponge, and she begins to scrub plates and load the dishwasher.

  I’ve been gripping my mug too tightly, and I see now that I’ve spilled some coffee on the counter: another stain.

  I set the mug down, get up and go to the sink, and put my arms around her from behind. I can feel myself getting hard before I even touch her.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmur in her ear.

  She smacks the single-lever faucet and the water shuts off. “Move.”

  I step well back as she transfers a heavy skillet from sink to dishwasher. Historically, pots and pans in the hands of aggrieved women are not my friends, and by the time Penny’s added detergent and switched on the machine my nascent erection isn’t even a memory.

  She turns to face me, drying her hands on a dish towel. Her eyes are no longer moist. It is in fact hard to imagine that we’ve ever fucked or had coffee in the mornings like a couple that doesn’t need language to know a few important things about each other.

  “Pen, listen—”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong idea about me, Dwight. Probably had me wrong from the start.”

  Her tone is so realized and final it’s hard to recover. The dishwasher kicks into a higher gear, then turns eerily hushed. Just to have something to do, I retreat back to the counter and my abandoned coffee mug—but, even as I move, a small sac of despair is leaking inside my chest, which mystifies and frightens me. It’s unclear whether this feeling has to do with Penny, or with myself, or with this sunny California morning that seems already to presage another dead-end journey.

  “What happened to you?” she demands. “That’s what I woke up this morning asking myself. Why the hell are you like this?”

  I taste the coffee again and it’s cold. I carry the mug to the sink and rinse it out.

  PENNY

  SHE DRAGS HER HEART with her onto the tennis court, the UCSB courts, which it is her privilege as faculty to use when she’s so inclined—her daughter, too, when the little tart-tongued sprite can be bothered. And there, if you’ve nothing better to do on a Sunday morning, you might observe her taking her romantic frustrations out on her own flesh and blood, whipping forehands and two-fisted backhands from corner to corner, dropping Wimbledonian touch shots just over the net, wristing ungettable topspin lobs over the head of the strong-willed but vertically challenged juvenile whenever the impulse strikes. Honestly, where is Child Services? Are there no protections for the young? She should be hauled in and booked, fitted with one of those white-collar security anklets.

  Ali watches another lob arc over her head, land fair, and, torqued with spin, rocket beyond reach. Her feet never move.

  Game, set, match.

  Congratulations, Professor Jacobs! You’ve just demolished your adolescent child, whose proper idea of sport is throwing herself into the Columbus Day sale at Abercrombie & Fitch.

  Mother and daughter stand on the court regarding each other. Mother already beginning to look a bit sheepish.

  Let’s go to the videotape, shall we: mother mumbles generic apology for deranged on-court behavior, which said apology daughter chooses to ignore; daughter walks to sideline, takes paperback of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy out of backpack, sits down on the hard ground, and begins to read.

  Take that, Mom, you bitch.

  Mom stands wiping perspiration from face with towel, watching daughter immediately sucked into better, fuller alternative universe, to which Mom herself wouldn’t mind being transported, though she knows she wouldn’t deserve the pleasure. Which leads her to the sadly inevitable conclusion that, despite the impressive plaque on her office door, she is an authority on precisely nothing. Leads her to consider possible means of escape. Leads her to say aloud to daughter, “Will you be okay alone for fifteen minutes? I need to check my office for something.” Though this is quite baldly a fiction; there is no something awaiting her, only silence, that simulacrum of peace. Daughter, in any case, doesn’t bother to respond.

  Mom hesitates, then begins walking away from maternal crime scene, thinking, in clichéd aphoristic fashion that ultimately depresses her further for its lack of originality: Another day, another disaster.

  Thinking: I hate you, Mr. Pullman. Thank you, Mr. Pullman.

  Thinking: My heart is sore and frightened because of a man who is a man who is a man.

  EMMA

  THIS SHE REMEMBERS EXACTLY: on freshman moving-in day at Yale, her father waiting for her outside Durfee, on Old Campus.

  She has seen him only once since his move to Chicago, a weekend visit to his new city that, they both afterward agreed, though it had been a while in coming, had yet somehow arrived too soon. They were not ready. Now she embraces him carefully, not sure what she will feel. This is habitual, but also encouraged by his appearance. He has lost weight, is slender as an immigrant. His beard is gone, his thick salt-and-pepper hair shaved close to the head. His glasses are different—severe black frames, in the manner of the Jewish intellectuals of his parents’ generation, whom he once told his daughter he had turned his back on.

  He smiles tightly, opens his arms. “You didn’t think I was going to let you do this all by yourself, did you?”

  He is speaking to her, but he might just as easily be speaking to her mother, who has stopped, in rebellion or shock, a few yards from the car, a box of books in her arms.

  “Hello, Grace.”

  “Ethan. I had no idea you were coming.” A sharp look at Emma. “Did you invite him?”

  The answer is negative, but Emma says nothing, neither nods nor shakes her head.

  Her mother marches forward slowly, eyes on the ground, as if suddenly mistrustful of her footing. She lightly bumps Emma’s father in the chest with the box of books, holds it there until he takes the weight from her.

  “Since you’re here,” she says, and returns to the car for another load.

  At Frank Pepe Pizzeria, crowded in by other freshmen and their families, the three of them share a large vegetarian pie and a carafe of the house red. The lunch, ostensibly celebratory, is laborious to the point of absurdity. Her mother’s manners are too perfect, sharp as the saw-wheeled pizza cutter that rests on their table like the symbol of an amputation none of them dare acknowledge.

  “Another piece, Ethan …?”

  Her father has drunk most of the wine. He cleans his glasses with his napkin too many times, and he begins to perspire.

  “I’m afraid I’d better start thinking about getting to the airport.”

  Emma looks from one parent to the other, a sickness rising in her throat. This is what it is like to know you are not forgiven.

  DWIGHT

  “SO?” I SAY.

  Sam and I two beers deep apiece at Loney
’s, a pubby sort of eatery I frequent largely because, with its satellite-TV subscription to Red Sox Nation, it reminds me a little of home. Not that this is necessarily a plus; but it needn’t be damning, either. It was my hope that Sam might appreciate it, too, for not dissimilar reasons.

  Unfortunately, with the Sox-Angels game already started on the wide-screen above the bar, and the room three-quarters empty, the ambience seems instead to have raised up our ghosts, the lost years and meals and the rest, the evenings not like this one.

  “So?” Sam repeats.

  “Do you have a problem with anger?”

  “Do I have a problem with anger?” A rippling smirk breaks the surface—my son, like his old man, no rank amateur: he can tell his mimic job is starting to get under my skin. “A problem like yours, you mean?”

  “I don’t have that problem anymore, Sam. I have other problems now, which we can talk about later, if you’re really interested. How about right now you just answer the question.”

  “I’ll answer it after you, Dad.”

  “Okay. I don’t have a clue. Last time I saw you, you were this little muffin of a kid struggling under a whole lot of stuff no kid should ever have to deal with. A pretty gutsy kid, in my opinion—a good kid. You’d had some tough luck in the old man department, okay, but you weren’t clubbing anybody with a baseball bat.”

  “Everybody grows up eventually,” Sam mutters darkly, eyes glued to the TV above my shoulder.

  The quiet bitterness of this remark sets me back in my chair. I reach for my glass, but it’s empty.

  And time seems to stop then, or even goes into reverse, as I look at the angry young man sitting across from me, unable, however I study him, to find evidence of the thin white scar that I know runs along the line of his left jaw: the scar made by my fist when, five years old, he jumped into the middle of a drunken fight I was having with Ruth on the night our marriage went bust. Every single second of that night was, for all of us, an accident of the worst kind. Just like that, because of me, his life—and mine—swerved off course. Though the still worse turns that were to follow didn’t immediately make themselves known—as, of course, they never do, until it’s too late.

  I’ve heard it said, and am here to affirm it myself, that if you turn yourself in for a crime you will earn yourself a shot at redemption. But there’s a statute of limitations on that one, I believe, though it’s not much mentioned by the moral philosophers of the day. Wait too long to speak up and you might just miss your shot. You may do your time, but you will never really get out.

  “You guys doing all right?”

  Our blond waitress, half my age, with the surfer’s wide shoulders and the blazing California smile: a veritable fun house of sun and salt packed into tight chinos and a blue oxford. My jack-o’-lantern grin seems to startle her, leading her to rear back slightly.

  “Doing great, thanks,” I answer, meaning possibly the opposite. It’s hard to tell anymore, so beset am I by memory, and now suddenly, incongruously wistful for all the waitresses I ever knew in the Northwest Corner, never as young as here but undiscovered stars every one of them, with their dark-polish nails and winter-colored hair and crow’s-feet around their eyes, and those lived-in smiles that draw you closer.

  “Just let me know if I can get you anything else?” This directed meaningfully at my son, whose handsome slouched fury she can’t take her eyes from.

  “Will do.” I grin tiredly at her again as she walks away. “Keep ignoring her like that,” I say to Sam, winking, “and she just might follow you home.”

  “Whatever.”

  We fall silent.

  At the start of the evening—with the sun still lingering in the sky and the dinner still just an idea in the making—it had been my sincere intention to try to persuade my son to return to school. Get your diploma first, I’d been going to exhort him, just get the goddamn thing and stick it in your pocket and that, at least, no matter what else comes to pass, they’ll never be able to take from you.…

  But the right time to have that pep talk somehow never seemed to arise; or maybe, rather, I just didn’t have the stomach to send him back East once he was finally here.

  I follow Sam’s gaze to the wide-screen above the bar. The game is in the eighth inning and the Sox, with a runner on second, are trying to fight their way out of a two-run hole. The base runner is Coco Crisp, I see, and in the batter’s box Big Papi’s stamping around, bat handle propped against his crotch, spitting into his massive palms and clapping like a circus strongman let loose from his cage.

  “Here we go!” cheers the Boston announcer, practically pissing himself with excitement. “All right, folks, here we go!”

  I turn back to my son, who’s no longer watching the game, or anything. A muscle twitching in his jaw, biting down furiously on all the words he’ll never say.

  I reach out and squeeze his arm. My voice thick and unfamiliar to us both. “Whatever the situation is, Sam, whatever happens with this, we’ll face it together.”

  His expression then declares that he can’t, or won’t, believe me.

  And in this, at least, we are the same.

  PENNY

  LETTING GO IS EASIEST. It would be by far the easier thing to do, and the smarter thing. She likes to think of herself as an intelligent woman of independent mind. She could just let Dwight Arno go back to wherever it is he came from. She could do that.

  The door to her office is closed. It is three-fifty in the afternoon, which leaves ten minutes before the start of office hours. In this circumscribed shelter she sits. Her box of Kleenex ready, next to her dog-eared copy of The Rattle Bag.

  Ten minutes: she could pick up the phone now and call him.

  Her office phone is black and old-fashioned. Bought at an antiques store, it is not retro but original; it refuses to indulge in the idea of change for change’s sake. It weighs about three pounds. With it, she likes to think, she could sink a dinghy; or call the president of the United States (no thanks); or, with a modicum of chutzpah, knock a broad-shouldered man unconscious.

  DWIGHT

  TONY LOPEZ, avowed family man and shrewd small-business operator, has offered my son the stockroom and cashiering duties previously performed by his nephew. Despite his misdemeanors, Evander will continue to receive his more than generous paycheck, but will henceforth be ghosted out of the store, made an employee in name only, free to skate and smoke his days into contented oblivion. Sam, on the other hand, not being family, will be paid a buck above minimum wage and embark on a trial period until Tony’s comfortable with the situation on a long-term basis, at which point opportunities for promotion may be explored.

  “Maybe take your old man’s job,” Tony says to him with a grin that can only be described as sly.

  The three of us are gathered at Mama’s Taqueria on a Tuesday evening. The workday done, the oiled-cheese scent of nachos in the air. I sip my Dos Equis and think about how all this might appear to Ruth—the paltry back-room starter job for our messed-up son—and feel a stirring of shame at not being able to do more for him. And yet, simultaneously, I am guiltily heartened by the prospect of commuting to work with him each morning, returning home each evening, the wordless camaraderie this would seem to promise, the intimate, meaningless chatter. The truth is I can hardly wait for it to begin.

  Tony sets down his mineral water with lime and leans across the table. “One thing we gotta get clear, Sam, okay? Whatever problems you had at school? Your dad here”—reaching out and pincer-gripping my forearm—“he’ll tell you straight out, I don’t put up with no shit in my business. You understand what I’m saying to you? Not in my business.”

  “He understands, Tony,” I say.

  Tony frowns at me without taking his eyes off Sam.

  “I understand, Mr. Lopez.”

  Tony sits contemplating the young man. What he reads there is anyone’s guess. Finished, he checks his gold Rolex, pushes back his chair, and stands up. It’s seven past seven, which
makes him seven minutes late for his regular sit-down dinner with Jodi and the girls. He is a family man, by God, and there are demands.

  “We got ourselves a little weekend softball league,” he says. “Hear you play some real ball—varsity third base?”

  “Till a couple weeks ago.” Sam’s face has begun to flush.

  “Me, I was center field, way back. Brother Jorge played catcher—like Posada with the Yankees. Man, I tell you? Jorge could swing the fucking lumber. Made it to Cape Cod summer league ’fore he blew out his knee.”

  “You should see Sam hit. The kid can smack it.”

  Sam turns and stares at me, the color vanished from his cheeks and his eyes dimmed by some internal judgment that I’ve just failed.

  “All right …” Tony’s already on his way to the door. “Just make sure you come out to the park with your old man this Sunday. We could use some pop in the lineup.” He pauses to grin over his shoulder at us, then he’s gone.

  Outside, the evening has turned California cool. Sam and I stand like tourists at an auto show, watching Tony guide his Mercedes out of the lot. Then we climb into my own car, the treated canvas top raised against the surprising springtime chill, and start for home.

  Neither of us speaks. Sam tries out a couple of my CDs, dismisses them with grimaces as geriatric bluegrass crap, and punches off the stereo. We make our way in silence through the night-shadowed, seemingly abandoned town, as if it isn’t the right town but some other. My son beside me yet miles distant, I have little choice at this moment but to acknowledge that I might be lacking some of the necessary tools for what I hope to do in the here and now. To build a solid, lasting bridge between two people, let alone a father and son with a history like ours, is a mighty human endeavor, and to sit here and think I might be able to accomplish it alone, with no previous success to my credit (indeed, failures too numerous to catalog), a tube of glue, a few pickup sticks, and a dollop of spit, is nothing short of hubris. And hubris, the Greeks tell us, will see you dead. The robed chorus chanting your name until, in the last act, they bury and forget you.