Stranger, Father, Beloved

by Taylor Larsen

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  To my mother, Harriet,

  a great reader and lover of literature,

  and to Jaime and Jamie

  CHAPTER ONE

  With the tops of the trees around the house lost in fog, Michael and Nancy James prepared for the last party they would ever have, though they didn’t know it at the time.

  In the planning of the party, the house was filled with an atmosphere of seriousness. Careful consideration was given to each decision, as if they unconsciously knew then that there wouldn’t be any more parties. Everything mattered all the more. They chose each dish, each appetizer with such care—quiches and salted ham on tiny rolls—and consulted each other obsessively about every little thing. They were united in this endeavor only. Nancy would follow Michael into the bathroom while he brushed his teeth and discuss her plans for decorating the tables, and they hashed and rehashed the options for hours until they were sure everything would look just right. Should they trust the weather? Should they set up tables with food outside or inside? Early May could be temperamental, and this spring was a cold, rainy one, but in these last few days the season seemed to finally be coming out of its depression.

  It was as if they were both aware, on a plane so deeply imbedded and subconscious that it would seem to hardly exist, that this night would forever change their lives, but they were not sure in what way. In the hours before the party began, Michael felt desire curdling in his belly, desire for something different. It seemed that something was already changing. At the beginning of the evening, he felt an electric charge being around Nancy, as if she were a girl he had just met at a party instead of his wife. As they let guests into their house, he knew that the guests, too, could feel that things were different. They were giddy, the two of them, giddy and youthful, and Michael observed that Nancy, in her long green silk dress, had, through some means of feminine sorcery, transformed herself into a beauty. She seemed to glide across the room, and her bones possessed a confidence that she deserved to live in this huge house; that she was not a bitterly unhappy wife advancing toward old age but a young girl, with her whole life ahead of her and a light in her heart that had not yet been put out.

  Michael had been becoming aroused frequently, and he experienced erections not directed toward anyone specific or for any particular fulfillment. At the party, he got one of those erections and excused himself to go to the bathroom. When it happened, he had been eating some smoked salmon on dry toast with capers and staring at a painting on his living room wall while his gin and tonic rested in the palm of his hand, cooling it. The painting showed a simple scene of an open field with lavender growing under a darkening sky, trees lining the perimeter of the field in the distance. Even though he had seen the painting a thousand times, today he was awed by it, and he momentarily forgot where he was. When he brought himself back to reality, he found he had a strong, pulsing erection, and he laughed without thinking and made his way into their small bathroom underneath the staircase. After he locked the door, he sat down on the toilet and sipped his drink as he waited for it to grow soft. He ran his tongue over the lime wedge in his drink. He had begun to feel so sensual recently. He wanted to touch and taste everything he could see.

  When Michael emerged from the bathroom, he found his old college friends out on the lawn and joined them. They were in the same way he was, he felt, the drink had them, too, and they had all forgotten their age. They kept looking up at the sky, which, because it was cloudy, reminded him of the sky in the painting he had just seen. His old friend Ben brought Michael another drink, and they sat on the stone wall at the side of the yard and talked about their days at the university. Big hydrangea bushes, full and blooming, caught the eye. Two light blue ones sat on either side of the patio hugging the back of the house. Three bushes with violet-colored hydrangeas sat around the far edges of the lawn, contrasting nicely with the bright green grass. The gray-shingled Cape Cod–style house stood impressively behind them, charming in detail and grand in proportion. He could see two neighbors’ houses from the backyard, but they weren’t close enough to be too oppressive. Their gray sides blended in with the green of the pine trees all around. One house had a tree house, and a skinny young boy stood up in it, watching the party.

  Michael, now forty-two, could act freely with many of these party guests, for they had known him as the brilliant scholar at Yale University, the winner of prizes for outstanding academic achievement, so many years ago. Nancy stood deferential and bashful when the lively group engaged in their academic talk, as she had been only a nanny for Michael’s favorite professor and had never attended college herself. Michael was glad she was not around at this moment, so he would not have to see her downcast gaze and smiles. All of his friends from college accepted Nancy, but their talk changed around her. They tolerated her, though they must have all been secretly shocked at his choice of a marriage partner when he was a younger man. Before he had switched to business for graduate school, Michael had been an academic star in philosophy and political science. Everyone had thought he would have ended up as a tenured professor at the university because of his former interests and talent.

  Michael stood by Will Campbell, his formerly shy classmate who had now blossomed into an extrovert, perhaps because of his marriage to a likable and talkative woman from college, Mary, who had brightened him up over the years. He now stood next to Michael, vodka in hand, talking to him conspiratorially, with an arm clapped over Michael’s shoulder. Will lived a five-minute drive away on the Peninsula but worked as a full-time professor at a community college on the mainland of Rhode Island.

  “Michael, Alex got in touch with me a month ago. He asked me to read an essay he wrote. I’m trying to help him get it published. I have some connections in Massachusetts at university presses . . .” Alex Woodson had been Michael’s best friend at Yale, but the two had drifted apart over the years.

  “Oh, is he still living in Massachusetts?”

  “Yes, he’s still there, has two beautiful little girls. Even though he works in finance, he started taking courses for his master’s degree in literature a few years ago, very on the side, and now he teaches one course a semester as an adjunct at some obscure little college. I think it makes him happy to have an oar in the academic world. His essay is, of course, brilliant, but we’ve been having a little trouble getting it placed. Would you consider taking a look at it?” Will asked. “You always gave such great critiques . . . I already ran it by Alex, and he seemed eager to get your feedback as well.”

  Michael was deeply flattered by the request, but he tried to hide the extent of his feelings from Will. “I would love to take a look at it,” he responded.

  “Great, I brought a copy with me. My wife has it in her purse. Remind me to give it to you before we leave.”

  Michael had not been a part of academia for so many years, yet the thought of it still gave him a charge of excitement that nothing else did.

  Michael looked up and saw the dear face of his sixteen-year-old daughter, Ryan, staring down at him from the window. She had refused to come down for the party. When his eye caught hers, she turned away abruptly from the window, and his heart ached at the disappearance of her face. He had forgotten for a moment that she existed, and then there she was, her hair messy around her face, her gaze curious and t
hen immediately guarded.

  He went inside and up the stairs to her room, thinking that maybe they could make up from the fight they had had earlier. He and Nancy had, though futilely, tried to insist Ryan should dress up and come down to the party. It had been a sticking point—he felt that she absolutely had to be there, but in the end, they couldn’t force her to be a part of it. In her usual fashion, Ryan had slammed the door, after yelling “You can’t make me do anything anymore. I can’t wait to get out of this house!” Nancy had knocked firmly on Ryan’s door and even raised her voice a little, and then Michael and Nancy had stood silently in the hallway, their arms helplessly at their sides. Now, hours later, Michael stood outside her room and placed his ear against the wood.

  “Ryan, you could come down for a little bit, huh? You’ve got to try the food. Your mom got the best.” He was referring to the salty Virginia ham that he knew Ryan loved. Nancy had had a leg of the ham shipped to their house for the occasion.

  There was no response from within, but he knew she was listening.

  “If you come down and apologize to your mother and me, then we’ll forgive you.” There was still no answer. She might have had her headphones on, lost in a world of dramatic music.

  Teenage behavior, he always told himself as comfort. Teenage behavior, not related to him. She would have acted this way with any set of parents, he would muse to himself, but these days, he secretly wondered if this was true. His daughter had become increasingly unhappy the older she got and the more beautiful she became. Morose posters littered her wall, black-and-white stills of various singers slumped against walls, pale-skinned women and men, looking up at the camera either as a challenge or as an erotic invitation. The posters had suddenly appeared one month, Michael supposed, as his daughter’s music interests changed. Two posters were of the same woman, a singer with full lips and a low-cut tank top staring at the viewer as if in challenge. The straps of her tank top were close to falling off her shoulders, almost exposing her breasts. He had been disgusted by the belligerent and blatant sexuality it professed and the anger burning in the young woman’s eyes. He did not want his daughter to see sexuality as a challenge, as a threat to unleash onto others, as these posters suggested. It was absurd, really, their beautiful, traditional Cape Cod–style house, the epitome of good taste, strewn with posters unashamedly celebrating women’s anatomy. What was next, tattoos, motorcycle rides, acid trips?

  Michael turned and left the vacuum of the second floor, space that lacked the life of downstairs and threatened to pull him back into his heavy fear, that mental state related to his faulty wiring. The walls were painted robin’s-egg blue, and he had bought two paintings from a famous local artist, Bill Clopher: one that depicted the ocean at its wildest, the tops of waves twisting in a white rage over its glassy green middle; and the other that depicted the ocean at its calmest, containing the murky forms of thousands of glittering-eyed creatures with tasks of their own, making its slow, almost indecipherable crawl under the moon’s instruction.

  Before rejoining the party, he looked out the window by the front door at the street beyond. A family raced by, all on bikes with different-colored helmets on their heads, the bright flash of them making him want to retreat into the cool, silent darkness of his basement. He slipped his right hand into his pants pocket and curved his palm over the bottle of pills. He could take one if he needed to, if his mind began to turn over the wrong thoughts, thoughts of panic and paranoia that he didn’t need as his companions. He had options. When he began to worry that a party guest was staring at him because his joke wasn’t funny, or if he felt all eyes were watching his back when really they weren’t, he could take a pill. If he did not take a pill when the first paranoid thoughts emerged, they began to worsen. The people around him must know he had pills in his pocket, this person before him assumed there was something wrong with him and was hell-bent on finding out exactly what, people were going to go home and do research on his background and try to find out something bad about him. These kinds of thoughts went on and on.

  He had to go to the bathroom. He went down to the room under the stairs and pulled hard on the handle. It was locked. He stood back a few paces and examined his hands. The nails were clean, but he saw that his fingers had gotten fatter over the years. Then the door opened, and a man who was almost exactly Michael’s height and whom he had never met stood before him. The man’s eyes were large and brown, and his expression was somber, reflective.

  “Enjoying the party?” Michael asked. “I’m Michael James, and this is my house—great to meet you.”

  “I just got here. I haven’t met too many people yet. I’m John. Your neighbor Mrs. Keller invited me,” the man replied bashfully.

  “Let me get you a drink.” He walked with the man to the bar and got him the same drink that he had. It did not occur to him that the man might not want what he had. Then Michael found Nancy and had his hand on her back and things seemed to be starting to spin, which he knew was a bad sign. He knew he would have to sober up. Nancy would say something to him soon, a quick, nonconfrontational suggestion that he shouldn’t be drinking for many reasons, especially considering that it mixed poorly with his medication, a fact he already knew.

  He went down to the basement to gather himself and sat counting from one to ten, letting the freezing cold, dead air tingle the side of his face. He opened a bag of potato chips he found next to the case of ginger ales and began to eat them and drink a soda. He lay back for several minutes of spinning and then finished the bag of chips. When he got up, he was much clearer in the head.

  When he returned to the first floor, he walked past the man from the bathroom, whose formerly tense face had softened from drink and who was talking with his neighbors. Their eyes met again, and Michael observed the man’s old corduroy jacket and khaki pants. He wondered, was he affiliated with the university? Perhaps.

  He found himself standing with Molly from the HR department of their company. Michael had been in the upper management of a software development company, Phairton, which had done so well that they had been able to sell it to a larger publicly traded company; in the sale Michael had been asked to stay on as a consultant for the new company, an offer that showed its management’s admiration for him. He still had his office and secretary at Phairton, but no one watched his hours. He had been integral in making a fortune for the original company and continued to bring in profit, and though he was still young, the high-profile title had worn him out in a span of years, and he was happy to be in a less pressured situation. The work had been interesting during the first couple of years to some extent, but it had never truly challenged his mind. Now he found it hard to focus fully on his work at all. Two paths had been presented before him at a young age: one, working in academia as a professor, which would have fulfilled him immensely, the other, this path that, while making life comfortable, daily drained him of his strength. Molly had worked with him for years, and ironically, even though she was not a people person, she was efficient at her work and quiet in her affairs, and no one seemed to mind her heading HR. She was one of the antisocial guests at the party, so Michael felt he had to attend to her. There she lolled, a skinny woman, her back slumped against the wall near the sliding glass door to the yard. She had a special liking for him, which he had never quite understood. She was quiet, yet tightly wound, and her nervousness was infectious.

  “Molly, so glad you could come. How are things going for you?”

  She appeared relieved to see him and stepped closer. He noticed that her face had a distinct line where the layer of foundation ended along her jawline. The skin on her neck was paler and less alive but more real. Women seemed to love Michael’s height, just over six feet, and his thin trim frame. Many, upon meeting him, would glance up at him, take him in, and their eyes would gleam with instant respect. He had a full head of hair, large eyes, and delicate features. By no means considered universally handsome, he was
also not considered unhandsome. He was not mentioned as one or the other, which left it all open to interpretation.

  “It’s good to get out. You know how it is,” she replied.

  Michael nodded. He pitied her, standing there in her olive-green dress and slightly worn-out black shoes. Those must be the shoes she always wore to parties, every year for God knew how long.

  “Where’s your daughter? I’ve always wanted to meet her after seeing her photo on your desk.”

  “She’s in hiding—you know how teenagers are. They never want to show themselves.” Molly was unmarried and seemed resigned to her fate. Desperately, Michael thought of what else he could say to her. His daughter was in hiding, and his severely asthmatic six-year-old son, little Max, was already asleep. There was nothing else to say about either one of them that he could think of.

  Michael felt as if Molly were forever searching his face for something. She was one of those mysterious women who was drawn to him and sought him out for some reason he could not identify. She repulsed him, but just because he could, he began to flirt with her, listening with his full being, talking sensuously, lightly touching her arm. He knew those attentions were delighting her, as they were so different from his normally cold demeanor. Just when he had her excited, he excused himself.

  Then he was back outside in a dark yard. Nancy had lit little candles, just as they had planned, and the air was lovely and warm, the lighting flattering to everyone, equalizing them all in an image of God’s beauty. All faces could bend and slant into something nice to look at if just given a kind and delicate light. Michael’s friends were young men again in this light, and the women were dangerous beings, deliciously different from them, whom they loved to watch glide around. His wife was not among the nymphets, so he went inside to find her.