The Testing of Luther Albright

by MacKenzie Bezos

  The following day, Liz was working the day shift, and Elliot told me he was headed to the library after school with Tim. Before he left, I asked him if he’d join us for dinner, and then I bought three T-bone steaks and set the table with cloth napkins. We sat down in the dining room, and Liz asked what the occasion was, and I paused a second to try to temper my excitement before I said it wasn’t an occasion really, I’d just been offered an intriguing job.

  “It’s just four engineers,” I said, “but they’ve been around seven years, and even in their first six months, they managed to land a job that had also been bid by Bechtel.”

  “Wow,” Liz said. Her cheeks were pink, and she was leaning toward me over the table. “What’s the company called?”

  “Interflow. I think I mentioned it to you. I used to work with the principal, Nathan Sattler.”

  “Oh, right,” she said.

  “The guy Bob called for you?” Elliot said.

  He was buttering a roll.

  “What?” I said.

  He said, “Bob told me he called somebody to tell them about you losing your job.”

  “He didn’t lose his job, Ellie,” Liz said. “He quit.”

  Elliot’s eyes were on the buttering job he was doing: lots of butter. “He said it was a guy you guys used to work with.” He set his knife down. “He said he went on and on telling this guy about what a good job you’d do.”

  “How nice of him,” I said.

  Elliot took a bite of his roll. Liz picked up her wineglass. Although I tried to head off the image, immediately I pictured it: the smile on Belsky’s face when the idea occurred to him; the studied casualness as he mentioned it to Elliot at his dining room table under an enormous chandelier purchased by his father-in-law.

  I said, “Anyway, like I said, they’re a great company, and I really liked all the partners there.”

  Liz took a sip of her wine.

  I said, “But I do have one hesitation about working there.”

  “What’s that?” Elliot said.

  “It would mean a lot of travel. A lot of their consulting is out of state. Some overseas. I need to think that through.”

  Liz refilled her wine then and asked Elliot a question about a funny noise Rita’s car was making, and I have to say that the tone of the evening had changed so abruptly that when I noticed the smell, for a split second I thought it might be something my mind had supplied as a kind of metaphor. But it quickly grew too strong to ignore. I know just when they noticed it because Liz’s eyes fell to her wineglass, and Elliot, normally too focused on his food to pay much attention to us anymore, began watching me intently. I understood immediately that they would wait for me to say something about it, and to avoid the sting of their courtesy I stood up suddenly from my chair. Liz was in the middle of a sentence, but I slid the window open and headed to the basement for my toolbox.

  THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, NATHAN TOOK ME TO DINNER AT A restaurant in the Hyatt hotel. His nose was still pink from the Middle Eastern sun. He ordered a bottle of wine from a vineyard in Sonoma I had toured with Liz the year before Elliot was born. Our waiter wore a suit and took our order by memory with his hands neatly folded behind his back. When he turned away, Nathan smiled.

  “So, when can I tell the guys the good news?”

  “I’ve thought about it a lot, really agonized about this, and I’ve decided I’m not the right man for your job.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not.”

  “What happened?”

  I had rehearsed my answer in front of the bathroom mirror as I tied my tie. “I’ll probably regret it because I respect you and your team so much, but I’m sure about this. I don’t think a job involving travel is the right choice for my family.”

  He squinted. “It’s not that much really. Half of the jobs are in state.”

  “I think any amount would be too much for us right now.”

  He stared at me. So much of consulting work relies on sales, and so few good engineers possess the necessary skills, that in retrospect the smoothness of his response alone should have been enough to make me try to change gears right there at the table. He let the silence last, thirty seconds, maybe sixty—much longer than was comfortable. Then he said, “Well,” and smiled, not unkindly. “I think we could make it work for you, but I know when to give up. You give me a call if you ever change your mind.” He was no doubt aware that relenting under such circumstances amounted to conservation of energy if I was really sure, and persuasion if I was not. “Here endeth the business dinner,” he said. “Now tell me about your son.”

  And so I did. For the rest of the evening, we talked about our children. He had a twelve-year-old daughter who had been mortified this past fall when he suggested that he escort her and a friend while they went trick-or-treating. In years past, he had worn a costume himself, and his fun-loving company had been a source of pride to her, but this year she was embarrassed at the thought that he would be seen by her friends. For his part, Nathan felt it had grown too dangerous for girls to trick-or-treat alone. Last year in his neighborhood, high school boys had set fire to a pile of leaves and driven a car into a tree. A man in a San Francisco suburb had handed out marijuana brownies at his door. This was the world we now lived in. Nathan’s compromise had been to follow his daughter at a half-block’s distance, ducking behind bushes when other kids passed, and although he laughed when he told the story, as if it were a scene from a comedy we were both watching, I imagined her embarrassment had been both a surprise and a discouragement to him, and the thought of him swallowing his own feelings to protect his daughter’s was again almost enough to make me change my mind and accept his offer.

  But I did not. I told him a few stories of my own, even one that I claimed was about Elliot’s adolescent struggle for independence, but was actually about my own. I had been invited to a party, and when my mother brought it up at dinner, my father had told me I couldn’t go. Although our house was only one floor, I was up until two A.M. staring at my window trying to work up the courage to unlatch the security grate and defy him. I did not even want to go to the party, but I had the sense that challenging him would become important, although the next morning when he asked for seconds just as my mother was serving herself her own first helping of eggs, it did not yet occur to me what I might have been practicing for. In the story to Nathan, I found that the made-up symptoms of my own anxiety in bed wondering if Elliot might escape did not differ materially from the symptoms I had felt lying in bed trying to work up the courage to disobey my father. It was a strange thing to have done, but I laughed with Nathan when he signed the credit card slip and suggested that for all I knew Elliot had gone to the party after all. As we stepped out onto the sidewalk into a damp blanket of night that was almost warm, I waited for a last entreaty from him to take a job at his firm, and as he pulled his car key from his pocket, I felt a bolt of loss.

  Driving home that night, I thought again about the magician from the birthday party. I had recalled the story during dinner, but I didn’t share it because I had a vague feeling that even in Nathan’s world, where the social currency of choice was self-mockery, this particular anecdote would reflect poorly on me. The truth was, as it turned out, Elliot’s party had not been my only encounter with him. Two years later, I had seen an ad for magic lessons on the bulletin board next to the men’s room at the Pine Cone. That morning I’d found a pregnancy test in the garbage in our bathroom. Liz and I had agreed to stop trying to have another child almost three years before, and finding the test had stunned me in a way I worked hard not to explore. All morning I would catch myself looking out my window, or my fingers pausing above my keyboard, or my coffee going cold in its cup, and at lunch instead of going to the deli, I went alone to the scene of my brief ease among men.

  It was probably a bad pick, the bar so urgently begged conversation between its patrons. I ate my sandwich quickly, and when a man sat down next to me while I waited for
the return of my credit card, I got up to go to the bathroom. That’s when I saw the ad for the Magic School. Elliot had long since stopped dressing in his cape and practicing with his cards, but I still occasionally took out the book that had come with the kit myself, and later that week, I found myself sitting on a folding chair in a room full of men waiting for the appearance of our teacher. When he stepped not from behind the curtain but from a chair in our midst, I recognized him, and I felt an inexplicable panic, as if a secret failure of mine were being exposed. He asked first how people had found out about the class, and when one man said he’d seen a flyer pinned to the bulletin board next to the dancers’ profiles at Shipley’s, I think I was the only one who didn’t laugh. Next he asked people why they wanted to learn magic, and when the most common answer proved to be so they could do tricks for their own children, instead of making me feel better about the company I was keeping, somehow it made me feel worse. He taught us a trick called the Vanishing Knot, guaranteed to surprise, and over the next few weeks, I practiced it at odd moments alone until the smoothness of the effect made my heart skip. The hesitation came when I looked for an opportunity to show it to Elliot and felt only embarrassment at the thought of revealing my ambition. After a week of this, I resolved to let my interest in magic go, but there was a sense of missed opportunity competing for my obedience.

  Driving home from my dinner with Nathan, I felt it again, and try as I might to resurrect the feeling of reassurance Liz had once conjured in me, I found I could not even re-create the substance of her argument. Magicians were unlovable? But I knew she would have admitted the joy they gave was real. Something dismissive about his costume? But her comment had struck me as more meaningful than this. It’s only recently that I was able to recall her line about the cape with any precision. It was the magician’s reliance on mystery to trigger happiness that she’d meant to dismiss. No matter how real Elliot’s pleasure at such tricks, or how pure-hearted the magician’s joy at stirring this feeling, real love couldn’t grow from a bond that relied so heavily on omission.

  I wish I’d been capable of this kind of insight then. It might have helped me head off a lot of things. For our father-son time that Sunday, Elliot had asked me to meet him in the living room. When I found him, he was sitting on the sofa, his elbows on his knees and a book on engine design in his lap. I stepped next to him, and he looked up at me.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  He rubbed the knees of his jeans. He had the look he often had in early childhood when he wanted permission to do something dangerous, or when he had broken something obviously fragile. He felt this too, and he looked down at his book again for strength. Then he pulled something out from underneath it: a blue folder with a plastic spine. He handed it to me.

  “What’s this?” I said, although of course I knew what it was.

  “It’s my report on Grandpa.”

  I was holding it in two hands, like a serving tray or a hymnal. I should open it, I thought. Instead I said, “Oh.”

  He waited, and I saw that there was bravery and resolve in this pause. I could hear the clock I had built ticking.

  “Terrific,” I said finally. “I look forward to reading it.”

  He laughed, a short burst. Then he waited. Then he laughed again.

  “What’s funny?” I said.

  “I finished it three weeks ago, and you still haven’t asked to see it.”

  “You didn’t offer.”

  “Since when do I have to offer?”

  It was a good question. Instead of acknowledging this, I said, “You interviewed me a dozen times, and it’s about my father. Of course I’m interested.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask?”

  “When you didn’t offer, I decided you must not be ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  His head was jutting forward and his eyes were squinting—a posture meant to signify equal parts disdain and legitimate confusion.

  I held up his report. “Well, really, thanks. I look forward to reading it when we get back.”

  “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is it. This is what I set aside time for. Now you’ve got some time to read it.”

  He stood and rolled up his magazine.

  I said, “I can always find time later this week. Let’s go see a movie or get pizza or something.”

  “I made other plans already.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m going to the A’s game. Opening day.”

  “Okay.”

  As he stepped past me, he looked as if he wanted to make some affectionate gesture, but he had obviously resolved not to. This was supposed to be a statement of sorts, I saw. When he reached the door, though, he could not help himself. “See you later,” he said, and although the front door is huge and swings so freely that to close it softly requires conscious effort, when he shut it behind him, it made almost no sound.

  I walked to the open window, and saw that Tim’s beat-up gray Pinto was already in the cul-de-sac waiting. As Elliot approached, the driver’s-side door opened, and Robert stepped out to offer Elliot the wheel. He was wearing a green cap with the A’s gold letter embroidered on the front, and a gaudy sateen windbreaker even though it was already seventy degrees. He clapped Elliot on the back as he rounded the door, and I could see Elliot’s head turn towards the house. That he wanted to be sure I had not seen this filled me with more envy than the gesture alone ever could have. Belsky opened the rear door to slide into the back, and seconds later, they were gone.

  I walked to the couch and sat down. The report cover itself had nothing on it, which somehow added to the suspense. I imagined opening it and finding something alarming. Something like, “My grandfather, Arthur Lincoln Albright, was not the kind of man most people would consider remarkable. He was a plumber in New Jersey, and he died unemployed of a heart attack at the age of forty-three. But I knew he was an interesting man because my father would never talk to me about him. Now I know why….”

  Instead, there was a typewritten cover sheet that read, “Arthur Lincoln Albright, 1915–1958.” Below it was a copy of the photograph I had given him of my father standing in front of his house, his shoulders square and his hands folded neatly behind his back. Below this, in red ink, it read “C+: Not enough interview material to meet project guidelines. Neatly organized. Good typing.”

  I did read the report, but the truth was that the teacher’s comments contained the full message he had wanted to pass along to me. It read not unlike a lean encyclopedia entry, plumped up with facts about his hometown and the plumbing trade and a brief biography of my mother that sounded so generic that it mentioned her eye color, something I am ashamed to say he must have gleaned from the driver’s license in the first file of things I gave to him: birth certificates, a wedding license, a copy of their mortgage and the title to my father’s van. It was exactly the kind of thing I had hoped to allow him to write, although I had imagined that the feeling such abridgment would yield was one of relief.

  Later that day, the telephone rang, and he told me without any hint of question in his voice that he was spending the night at Tim’s, and the following afternoon, when Liz was called in on short notice to work, I picked him up at school. He slipped in the passenger’s-side door and opened his magazine in his lap.

  “Would you like to drive?” I said.

  “No thanks.”

  “How was the game?”

  “Good,” he said, but he did not look up from the page. On it was a picture of a crash dummy striking a windshield with his forehead. He said, “You’re not taking that job with that guy Bob called, are you.” It was more of a statement than a question.

  “It’s too much travel, I think. I’m worried about spending less time with you and Mom.”

  A small nod. He was still looking at his magazine. He brought it closer a moment to indicate his change in focus, but I could tell somehow from
his posture that he was only pretending to read. I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb and thought about what I might say. On the drive to his school, I had tried to prepare for a conversation about his report, but each time I came up with an opening it began with an apology I felt afraid to explain. He held his gaze on the magazine all the way to Sunrise Boulevard before turning the page. He paused here too, but it was only the masthead and an ad for motor oil. The car felt hot. I cracked the window for air, and it riffled the pages of his report on the seat beside me. He looked up at me then, but I could not turn my eyes from the road. I could have glanced at him, but I felt it would cement the strangeness my silence had forced, and so instead I checked my right mirror and changed lanes. The move was abrupt and required me to cut off another driver in a way that was almost aggressive. I knew he would notice this, it was so unlike me, but there was no explaining it away. At last, in the stranger’s voice with which puberty had left him, he addressed me. “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course. You can ask me anything.” With my peripheral vision I saw his eyes scanning my profile. Neon signs passed behind him. I said, “But you might want to wait until after the surprise.”

  “The surprise?” he said.

  The words had simply risen up in me. My heart pounded. “Yes,” I said. Then I winked at him and turned right into a Toyota auto dealership.

  He was hesitant at first, but I told myself that this was only natural. In the end, he picked a sporty coupe with a sunroof, and we test drove it together on the softening tar of the access road he had traveled so many times in Tim Belsky’s Ford. The dealer reached forward between the bucket seats from the tiny rear bench to turn a blast of cool air on our faces and demonstrate the stereo. It was an instinct for diffusing all strains of tension that is the distinguishing talent of even the coarsest salesman, and within an hour Elliot had chosen the car in a color and trim line they had on the lot. We drove across the lot in separate cars, he in front and me behind him, and as he approached the boulevard, his right turn light began to blink. It was then that the anxiety I might have felt but did not in the salesman’s office finally seized me. All the way home, Elliot drove as carefully as an elderly man, coasting to stop signs and watching for signs of me in his mirror.