The Testing of Luther Albright

by MacKenzie Bezos

  I had not thought through my plan. Now that the wind was not on me from riding, I was so hot inside my coat that sweat streamed down my forehead. I crossed the parking lot and left my bike behind a Dumpster in the alley. I dug change out of my pocket, bought a ticket, and went inside. To the right of the men’s bathroom was a flight of stairs that led up to the projection booth where I imagined thugs might be settling a score with my father. But under the weak pressure of a stare from the man at the popcorn counter, I faltered and pushed through the swinging doors into the theater. It was almost empty, and so in the front row it was easy to detect my father’s head.

  I followed him five more nights that month, and each time he went to the movies, twice more to White Christmas. When I watched him spoon soup to his mouth in our kitchen, or sat by my mother as she glued the handle on a broken teacup, I thought about what I knew. When I listened to their footsteps through the wall at night, I thought about it. In the last year, she had developed a secret of her own, a pack of cigarettes she took from under her mattress only in the mornings, a habit so benign it only merited hiding because it was a by-product of her pain. Although I expected the senselessness of my father’s actions to damage her further, when I heard him tell her he had something to apologize for, I felt relief.

  I sat up on my bed. She was chopping something on the cutting board, and she stopped.

  “Set that knife down,” he said. “Why don’t you sit at the table here.”

  She set down the knife. A chair scraped the floor. In all my life, I don’t think she denied him anything. “What is it?”

  “I been coming home late a lot to go for a beer.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s been making things tough for you with getting meals on the table.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “The thing is, I haven’t been going for a beer.”

  In the silence that fell, I could hear something sizzling on the stove.

  He said, “I’m not going to do it anymore, and it’s over, but the thing is, I’ve been seeing a lady.”

  More sizzling.

  He said, “The truth is, I’ve been seeing her a couple months now. I don’t blame you for being angry.”

  There was a charred smell then. The sound of chair legs and a pan being set at the back of the stove. “I forgive you,” she said.

  “You what?”

  “I forgive you,” she said.

  I was still thinking about this on Saturday morning when we drove to the DMV. We arrived half an hour before it opened with doughnuts and coffee. We were not the only ones. On the pebbled-concrete sidewalk, several teenagers sat at the feet of their parents and flipped through driver’s manuals to avoid making conversation. It struck me that Elliot had never been one of these children, but in the weeks since my resignation, with me at least, he had become one. It was only three months until summer vacation, and I consoled myself by thinking about how a remodeling project might rekindle some of the lost ease with him that Liz still seemed to enjoy. I remember distinctly that by this point on our outings together I often had the strange sensation that I was watching someone else’s wife and son, as if their time together in my presence, even when they were just reading side by side in silence, was charged with an intimacy that no longer included me.

  Liz opened a box of doughnut holes and held it out towards him.

  “No thanks,” he said; “I ate like ten in the car.” He looked down at his magazine, something he’d been buying lately called Auto Craft. He was reading an article titled “Restore Your Own.” He had always been the kind of student who tested easily, and the fact that he had not even brought a copy of the driver’s manual was a measure of his calm.

  Liz herself paged through one. “Did you read the stuff about licensing requirements? I can’t believe you get tested on it, but it looks like you can. As if anyone needs to know what kind of certification you need if you’re sixteen and you’re visiting from out of state. As if this information actually helps you drive a car safely.”

  Without looking up, Elliot said, “A California license or a Nonresident Minor Certificate.”

  Liz beamed. “That’s it exactly.” Then she flipped to a new page.

  I opened the newspaper and read an article about a new sweetener that had been approved by the FDA. As nine o’clock approached, the line began to lengthen quickly: an overweight father and son; a girl in a McDonald’s uniform; a man in scrubs; a willowy woman with an embroidery hoop and a bag of orange yarn. At two minutes to nine, a man appeared behind the glass doors with a ring of keys and looked down at his wristwatch. He waited for two minutes to pass and then unlocked the door. Now we all shuffled through it, and Elliot took a numbered paper ticket from a dispenser on the wall. Liz found us three chairs and sat down with the manual.

  She said, “Another sample question is, ‘You just sold your vehicle. You must notify the DMV within how many days?’ How can that be important? They’re obviously just checking to make sure people read the manual.” Her eyes slid toward Elliot.

  “Ten,” he said.

  “Right again.” She shook her head proudly.

  When they called his number, he went up and took a test booklet to a shelf along the wall. Liz closed her manual to watch. He leaned on his elbows as he answered, and his back was to us: loose jeans and sneakers. It took him five minutes to complete, and he walked it back up to the desk. After they checked it, a man in chinos and loafers walked out from behind the counter and led Elliot out the door for his behind-the-wheel.

  Liz looked down at the manual again briefly, but this was really too awkward a thing to do now that his written test was over. She shut it and laid it on her lap. The tension that built now when we were alone together was still sort of a shock to me, but I have come to believe there is a kind of natural arithmetic to intimacy—that lack of context between two people will grow exponentially because it makes new data so awkward to exchange. In the last week, I’d been offered two more jobs, but somehow I still hadn’t told her, not because the offers themselves were secret in any way, but because my feelings about them were tied to too many things I hadn’t shared.

  One was a firm that designed tailings dams—the dams that hold back waste left over from mining or distilling done by industrial clients. Their offices were in a new building downtown, and their desks were made of mahogany. Such is the nature of a business with a marketing department. As I waited for my interview, I sat on a thickly upholstered chair and drank coffee from a cup with a saucer. The job description involved site investigation, and they had clients in Mali and São Bento, Brazil. It would no doubt pay well, and the change in the technical aspects of the work might have appealed to me—I knew nothing about designing for toxic reservoirs—but as I neared the end of my interview, I found I was already rehearsing the lines of my refusal. The engineer who interviewed me seemed competent, but as I answered his questions, I could not shake an image of myself sitting across a Formica-topped table from him, unfolding a sandwich wrapped in deli paper. In my mind, the deli was filled with noise, the cashier calling out orders, other customers talking, but our table was clouded over with a silence that amplified the noise of our bags and wrappers. By the end of the interview, I was certain I had impressed him, and took his call the next day for granted, but when it came, I felt no excitement. He asked for an answer within two weeks, and I knew immediately both that I would wait a full two weeks to call him, and that when I did, I would say no.

  Sacramento Municipal Utility District offered me a job as a Civil Engineering Supervisor to manage not only the design of dams, but also all the concrete vaults and bridges in their system. I’d been screened first by a Human Resources Counselor in shiny support hose and a blouse that tied at the neck who called me Mr. Albright and didn’t look up from the list of questions on her clipboard more than twice during our interview. It didn’t pay quite as well as the other, but it involved no travel and the hours would allow me more time at home. These
were the items I had added to the list in a small notebook at the kitchen table that night as I ate leftover lasagna and listened to the evening news. Elliot was at Tim’s, and Liz was working. It was a very good offer, really. From a technical standpoint, it would involve some new challenges. I added this to the list. The engineer I’d met with had seemed friendly, but now I could no longer remember his name. When I called him the next morning, I had to look it up on his business card. Frank. I asked for printed information on their medical plan to stall for time.

  What I found myself looking forward to, somehow, was a meeting with Nathan Sattler, the colleague of mine who had left the Department after he threw the stapler at the conference room wall. He had called me just after my resignation to say he had read the paper and ask if I’d like to talk. He was about to leave town for a dam site in Egypt, but he had suggested we meet when he got back, for some reason at the corner of Thirteenth and L in Capitol Park. I had always thought of myself as very different from Nathan, even felt superior about it back in the days when I sat at the long table at the Pine Cone and watched him throw peanut shells at the screen with Belsky when the umpire made a bad call. But now, as I looked at a long list of interviews with people whose names I had to track on a spreadsheet, the comfort of the shared circumstances of our exits from the Department and the idiosyncrasy of a meeting in the park and the memory of the ease I had once felt at his invitations were like pieces of driftwood in a vast ocean. I looked forward to the interview with unreasonable excitement.

  Sitting next to Liz at the DMV, this is what I was thinking about, but instead of saying so, I leaned forward to watch the Chrysler with its STUDENT DRIVER placard pull out of the lot.

  “Well,” I said. “I think he’ll do okay.”

  “Me too,” she said.

  She picked a thread from the hem of her skirt and broke it neatly. When she opened her manual again, it was more than I could take.

  “I got another offer yesterday,” I made myself say. “From the power company.”

  She smiled pleasantly. “Are you interested?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “But…?”

  “But I’m going to wait to answer them until I’ve talked to one more person.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Nathan Sattler. He worked in Design with me before he left to start his company.”

  She nodded and ran a hand over the seam of her skirt again, looking for more loose threads. The truth is there had been many times in our marriage when I had chafed under her attention, but now that it had waned, it seemed a clear step in the wrong direction. She nodded as she listened now, something she had never needed to do to indicate her listening—a sort of cover. She turned a page of the driver’s guide. Since we had made the appointment for the test, she had twice mentioned the possibility that we might see more of Elliot once he didn’t have to rely on Tim for rides. I wondered if she was nervous, but felt asking might somehow insult her. She was staring at a diagram of a car turning left onto a one-way street. I kept waiting for her to turn the page but she didn’t. Her hand rose to her face, and she touched her lips lightly.

  Finally I said, “He should be back soon.”

  “Who?” She blushed when she said this. I still wonder sometimes what she had been thinking.

  “Elliot,” I said. “From his test.”

  Color blossomed along her collarbone, and she looked down into her lap again. “Yes,” she said. “Soon.” And as the flush subsided, she reached into my lap and took my hand.

  A moment later, our son came through the door, and he followed the man in chinos to the back where a woman took his picture with a flash from a giant camera. He waited in a chair along the wall until she called his name. Only then did he look for us, and when he saw me, I remember that he smiled. It’s memories like this of him that still hold the most mystery for me. It’s not so difficult to imagine what he was thinking when he sat down at the kitchen table with his head newly shaven, or when he jumped into the air above our roof. But when he seemed pleased to find my face in a room full of strangers. It’s things like this I keep going over. I would like them to be as they felt to me then—pure—but I find I can’t help but wonder whether the surprises he unleashed on me that year were just impulses that fired suddenly, or careful plans he held in mind even as he made the simple gestures that gave me hope. When he reached our row of chairs, he handed me his license, still warm from the laminator.

  NATHAN APPROACHED IN SWEATPANTS AND RUNNING SNEAKERS, grasped me by the shoulder to turn me, and kept walking, bringing me along with him.

  “Thanks for meeting me like this,” he said. He was out of breath.

  “No problem.”

  “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too.”

  He was holding a small set of hand weights. He pumped his arms as we passed the rose garden. “They did that operation with the balloon on me, and when my family picked me up at the hospital and took me out to dinner, I ordered a cheeseburger, and my daughter said, ‘Don’t you care about us at all?’ She actually said that. I promised her I’d exercise every day no matter what. I sent her a picture from Egypt last week of me trudging across the sand in running shorts and sneakers.”

  A squirrel darted in front of us, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “Thing is, I’m not sure she appreciated the effort. When I got home, she scowled when I buttered my potato. I said, ‘I’m working on it, baby, I’m trying, didn’t you get my picture? That was a sand dune I was jogging over. In Egypt. Egypt is hot.’” The bridge of his nose was red and peeling.

  I tried to formulate a response to this, but one by one rejected words of sympathy, humor, and commiseration. People with briefcases hurried past us. When we reached the corner of Fifteenth and N, Nathan pivoted and pumped back towards the center of the park. Finally I said, “How’d the job go?”

  “Fantastic. I’ll have to go out again next month, but the construction engineers aren’t idiots, which was a relief to find out.”

  “That’s good.”

  “That’s unheard of.”

  I laughed.

  He said, “So tell me how it happened.”

  “Krepps came in the day the article ran and offered me a transfer.”

  He stopped and put his hand weights on his hips. “The same day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No.”

  “Where to?”

  “Fresno.”

  “Ha!” He started walking again. “What exactly did you say?”

  “I said I’d rather look for other work.”

  “I mean to the reporter.”

  “I told them I thought the investigation of North Fork was a waste of money.”

  “Ha!”

  “Well, I regret it. It was impulsive, which isn’t like me. I wouldn’t do it again, regardless of the outcome.”

  “Then if they call back, give them my number.”

  I laughed.

  “I’ll give them a sound bite.”

  I laughed again.

  “You know I’m not joking.”

  He turned abruptly toward the fountain, and I had to jog a little to catch up.

  He said, “So come to work with us, why don’t you? We’re looking for a fifth, and we haven’t found anyone we like around here. My chief engineer is talking to a guy from L.A.”

  “Really?”

  He looked down at his watch and put two fingers to his neck. “Yes. Really. Come to our place tomorrow, and I’ll show you around.” He glanced up and smiled. “But this time bring some French fries with you.”

  When I stepped into his office the next day, I felt immediately at ease. It was on the second story of a strip mall in Roseville. Although most consulting firms try to impress their prospects with nice offices, most of Nathan’s first clients had been overseas, and as they built up a reputation they discovered its appearance didn’t really matter even to those who saw it. The desks wer
e steel with brown Formica tops and all of the office views were the same, of the parking lot and a hardware store, a dry cleaner, and a veterinary clinic in a similar building on the other side of the road. As we talked, people walked dogs and cats and a cage full of hamster tubing in and out of the clinic door. The receptionist showed me wallet-sized school portraits of her daughter and son. Although I had worn a suit, Nathan laughed about this and tugged off my coat, and it turned out to be less an interview than a sales pitch. Each of his partners came into Nathan’s office to meet me and ask if I had questions, and when they left, Nathan showed me pictures of the dams they’d worked on and handed me a letter in which he described an offer that was not materially better than the others I’d fielded in a financial sense, but made me feel a surge of relief. He told me to think about it, and in order not to seem desperate, I told him I would, although already I was imagining calling those other people and telling them I’d decided to take another job.

  When I got home, that is what I did. I’d already refused one of them, and now I called the others, and when I couldn’t get through to the engineers who had made the offers, I spoke to the HR Directors instead. I thought there was a chance I would get a callback from one of them that afternoon with words of persuasion. When I didn’t, instead of feeling insulted, I felt only more certain of my choice. That night Liz worked late, and Elliot spent the night at Tim’s again, and for once neither thing gave me that feeling I’d suffered so often lately that I can now recognize as equal parts worry and shame. I opened a bottle of red wine and poured some into a glass full of ice cubes. I squeezed an orange into it, and crushed a wedge of apple and dropped this in too. Then I took it out on the porch and sat down in a chair next to the hot tub. Summer would come soon enough, and I let the memory of past afternoons and weekend days working beside my son quell my worry that I would lose him. As for Liz, with her working more at the Crisis Center, it struck me that the shortest distance back to intimacy might be to ask to visit her there and meet some of her coworkers. For the first time in weeks, I made plans about this instead of the plumbing problem or my job search. After visiting her work, I might take her to lunch and bring with me a poem I’d written on a napkin at a coffee shop just before I proposed. It would strike a tone. Stars began to show, and I realized I had been so lost in these hopeful thoughts that I’d forgotten to take a sip of my drink. I raised my glass and when it tasted nothing like Liz’s sangria, instead of disappointment, I felt a clean gratitude for my wife that made me laugh alone in my yard.