7 The Stand-Up
WHEN I ARRIVED IN THE ATTIC WITH THE SAW, ELLIOT HAD already prepared the area. He had slid his bed towards the stairs and taken down the swimsuit calendar. He had pulled back the rug. On the bare white wall, he had measured and traced a level rectangle with a razor knife. At the sight of me, he kneeled, and I handed him the saw, thinking that letting him do the work himself would take the sting out of the sloppiness we were about to expose. Then he turned to the wall and forced the sharp tip into the Sheetrock.
It is hard to describe the feeling I had as I crouched next to him watching him cut into the wall. Sometimes I wonder how much of the scene has been revised by hindsight, but there’s good evidence that even before I knew what would happen, I was nervous. I remember I’d worn a dark T-shirt, because I knew the tension would make me sweat. Since that day last summer, it seemed he was urging me to tell him I thought there was something wrong with him, to show some disapproval of the person he was becoming, and now in some way the plumbing had once again caused me to do just that. When I’d suggested that an oversight in our work—I’d been careful to call it ours—in the attic might have caused the problem, he had simply nodded and asked what kind of saw we should use to cut into the wall. I’d considered telling him stories of things I had overlooked building the house, pointing out how errors were inevitable even in the work of the most careful craftsmen, but it seemed to me that this kind of obviously scripted comfort would only make more of his mistake. In the end, out of what I will admit was mostly cowardice, I’d decided to wait to see how he reacted to the evidence of his own heedlessness. But the waiting—wondering what I would say, and what he would do, and suspecting that whatever I would say would annoy him as he made his slow careful cut—each stroke of the saw making a sound like ripping cardboard, almost ten full minutes of this—I think this was some of the greatest stress I had ever felt as a parent. Squatting next to him, the sloping ceiling close above our heads, I was getting hot and light-headed and my quadriceps were shaking. I stood and took a step back to the open air beneath the peaked roof. When he set the saw down and wiggled the long strip of Sheetrock free, my heart was racing.
“It looks perfect,” he said.
What I felt first was a little bolt of fear at the sophistication of this. He was making it more awkward on purpose, I thought, forcing me not only to point out his mistakes but also his inability to detect them. I forced a casualness into my tone. “Let me take a look.”
When I squatted next to him though, I quickly saw that he was right. The plastic vent arm was well supported all the way down, every strap hanger attached at perfect perpendicularity to the pipe, all the screw heads flush. At the sight of this, I might have felt a moment of relief at not having to shame him, but suddenly the snow of wallboard dust and the misplaced furniture and the ragged hole in the wall were deeply embarrassing. I tried for a tone of clinical interest, almost enthusiasm: “Interesting. Well, the most likely thing then is the temporary clog.”
He hesitated. “More than once?”
“Sure,” I said. “There could be something insoluble in the waste pipe that keeps catching things temporarily as they go down.”
“Like what?”
“A hair clip or the cap to a bottle of shaving cream. Hair or food could catch on it briefly to plug the drain and then work its way loose with enough water flow.”
When he nodded at this, I knew he had moved to pity for me. I braced myself for his kindness.
“So how do we get at it?” he said.
We would snake the pipes through every fixture drain and cleanout in the house with a seventy-five-foot power snake. We would begin at the top and work our way down. We would miss nothing. I could tell by the way he looked at the floor just when the length of my description began to betray my uncertainty, and I cut myself off. I suggested a trip to Briggs the following afternoon, and again he hesitated. Then he set his glasses back on his ears and said he’d drive straight from school and meet me.
Larry’s wife didn’t seem to notice me when I came in, and, given the circumstances of my visit, I was grateful. She was watching an early incarnation of those shows that specialize in getting real people to discuss their personal problems in front of an audience. A woman was describing her husband’s lack of sympathy about her depression since the last of her children got married. The man tried to interject, but the woman’s voice grew louder and more tremulous, and he no doubt saw the futility of trying to defend his sensitivity by interrupting her on national television. The thought of them eating dinner at home that night after the taping, each silently mystified by the greater distance they felt, made me sad.
I moved to a bin full of neoprene sleeves and focused my attention on the question of a summer project that might be exciting enough to win Elliot’s attention. As much as I had been hanging my hopes on this as a path back to intimacy with him, it had of course occurred to me that after all that had happened he might not want to spend the bulk of his summer on a project with me. Somehow I reasoned that if I chose carefully, I could pick something that appealed to him in terms of challenge and objective, but still allowed him enough time during the mornings and early afternoons to spend time with his friends. I thought of setting the hot tub into the deck, but the truth was he had never brought anyone home to use it as I’d hoped he would, and although the work would involve some tricky problems, it didn’t seem the end result would be enough of a change to be rewarding. I tried to think of improvements to his attic room that he might appreciate, but all I could come up with was wall-to-wall carpeting, which would take a week at most and would require him to move temporarily back into his old room on the second floor. My best idea so far had been an addition to the garage—a new bay where he could park his car in the winter. It would be an interesting project, including some demolition and a lot of framing, but the scale of the job seemed likely to cut into his time at Belsky’s, and I felt a sad certainty that this would be a greater loss to him than the time he shared with me. I was thinking about this, staring at a bin full of screw clamps, when Larry’s wife said, “Did you hear that one?”
I looked around; I was surprised that she had even noticed me.
I said, “I was sort of absorbed.”
“She really chewed him out that time.” She was looking at me over the top of an aisle. “Need help finding something there?”
“No, thanks.”
“You seem to be stuck.”
“Not at all.”
“No man’s an island.”
I said, “Actually, I’m waiting for my son.”
“He’s meeting you here?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, but no fighting this time.”
She meant this to be funny to me, and I smiled to be polite, but the truth was the comment annoyed me. Back in January, when I returned the smoke pump, I had brought Elliot with me. Although I was still putting it off, at that point it was pretty clear that I would have to suggest his own error might be at fault, and I wanted to undercut the insult of this by treating him as an equal partner in the diagnosis. I had shown him the vent increasers, which can be used to widen a vent opening in climates colder than ours. In the winter, the narrow mouth of the stack can fill with ice or snow, and this too can siphon a trap. He was quiet as I talked, and in the end, I may have spent as much as fifteen minutes delving into the physics of venting. When I had gone to the counter to return the pump, Elliot wandered over to a display stocked with flanges, and Larry’s wife leaned towards me. “I’ve got four of my own at home, and sometimes they give me the same treatment.”
“Excuse me?”
“The silent treatment. They think it’s so much torture.” She laughed and shook her head. “Trick is not to fight it. Just take the quiet as a secret blessing.”
I didn’t point out that a little silence in a teenager hardly constituted hostility because it occurred to me that Larry’s death had probably brought a lot of both things into her home. But t
o be honest, it seemed likely to me that her confrontational style had created plenty of tension in their family even before he was gone. I doubted a person like her would see it this way, though. Not for the first time that year, I thought of that time my father called me to his room to talk to me about the centrifugal pump. Mice had infested the house, but he had not set traps, and their urine scented the hallways. I found him sitting at his bedroom window looking out into the yard, his finger holding a place in a book he had taken from my mother. Outside, the abandoned components lay on a towel in the yellowed grass.
“You finish that pump,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“The pump you started. You’ve been letting it rust to make some kind of statement, I guess.”
“Sir?”
“It’s a good plan you had. Follow through with it, damn it.”
The room was dim with light from the one bulb that had not burned out months ago.
He said, “Your mom spent a lot of time driving you around town finding those parts.”
“I know.”
“Some of them cost money.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think you can do whatever you please? You think you’re not responsible to anybody? You think you can’t make people angry and disappointed just the same as you make them proud?”
“No, sir.”
“‘No, sir,’” he mimicked my voice and shook his head. “Finish that pump by Friday.”
I stared at him.
“Bet you think you’re pretty unlucky.”
I tried to think of an answer to this.
He said, “To have a nasty, lazy, son of a bitch like me for a dad?”
“No, sir.”
I saw my father flinch in the dim light.
We passed a moment in the dark saying nothing, and finally it occurred to me that we were so far apart in this conversation that each of us would be better off alone. As I turned to leave he said, “Your mother, she’d just pick up the rusty parts one day while you were at school and haul them to the dump. She’d be making you soft-boiled eggs next day and sugaring your tea, but me, I’ll take the belt to your ass and not stand to look at you for weeks.” He closed my mother’s book. “I’m the one that loves you.”
I was going over this memory a second time when Larry’s wife spoke to me again. She had stepped from behind the counter and was refilling a bin of washers at the end of the aisle.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Your boy. Looks like he stood you up.”
“That’s unlikely.”
“That’s the next step. That’s it after the silent treatment.”
“I seriously doubt he’d—”
“The stand-up.”
“Nonsense.” I was unsuccessful this time in keeping any of the irritation from my voice, but to my surprise, at the clear sign of it she simply smiled and winked at me. Her hair was a little damp I noticed now, and I could smell chlorine. I was trying to think of something to say that would cut her short and make my disdain for her clear, but instead I pictured her gripping the edge of a swimming pool, her skin sheeting water. Sometimes I watched my thoughts like a man in a theater. They seemed separate from me. Not mine. I looked down at the globe valves. I didn’t really think Elliot would keep me waiting like that intentionally, but when it occurred to me how long I’d been there, lost in my thoughts, I was first startled; then, afraid.
I said, “I need to rent a power snake.”
And she said, “What’s the problem?”
Suddenly, she was more than I could bear. “Please. I just…” I think I must have put my hands in the air, a kind of plea or surrender. I am not sure what I did. I said, “Can I use your phone?”
“Sure you can,” she said. Her voice was softer now. She went in back for the snake while I called, but after six rings, the answering machine picked up and at the sound of Liz’s recorded voice my throat swelled.
When Larry’s wife saw me hang up, she said, “Hey, listen, I’m sure he’s fine.”
I handed her a credit card.
She said, “I used to worry too, but being late never once meant an accident. It was always just to get a rise out of me.”
I made a business of arranging things in my wallet. Bills from biggest to smallest. I saw that picture from the Grand Canyon, and this time I did not take it out.
She was saying, “And if you want, one of my kids or Larry’s brother could help you out with that clog. I could do it myself after closing. I could even close early if you want.”
“I’m fine. Really. Thank you,” I said.
“Okay.” She cocked her head and shook it once, ever so slightly. “Good luck, Luther Albright.”
The traffic on the highway was thick, and it took me fifteen minutes to reach my exit. While he had always been a responsible boy, during our lessons together, I’d detected the seeds of a clear tendency to challenge other drivers on the road. I was aware of the unlikelihood of a newly licensed teenage driver with his own car choosing to ride his bike, but that’s nevertheless the absurd kind of thing I found myself hoping for. In the first weeks of ownership, I reminded myself, he actually drove it very little. One night, I woke and went downstairs for a glass of seltzer and saw him standing barefoot in the driveway in his pajamas, just staring. As I turned onto Alameda, I seized on the possibility that Tim had given him a ride, but this seemed unlikely too. Elliot’s car, of course, was much nicer than Tim’s.
When I pulled into the cul-de-sac, his yellow coupe was there. I opened the front door to the sound of bass music playing above me, and although his taste in music had evolved into something only Liz seemed to understand, I felt a quick lightness beneath my breastbone at the sound. I was as excited to see him as if he’d been away for weeks. Although I wasn’t a young man, I took the stairs two at a time. When I crested the second flight, I found him lying on the sofa in his attic bedroom, eating a peach, his hand glistening with juice. He looked up at me from his magazine, eyebrows raised, and I thought of my father holding that hand of cards after my science fair, the sink full of dishes. A rivulet of juice ran into Elliot’s sleeve, and I understood with certainty that Larry’s wife had been right. My son had left me waiting intentionally.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hi.”
“I think your mom left casseroles in the freezer for us.”
He blinked.
I said, “I like the ham and bean, but I think there’s also tuna noodle, if you prefer.”
“What?”
“Ham and bean then,” I said, and I turned and went down the stairs.
In the pantry, I opened the standing freezer. Inside was a stack of casseroles in blue-lidded Tupperware containers each prepared by Liz when her hours at the Crisis Center first began to increase. Standing there looking at them, I was struck at once by the tenderness of these preparations and the premonition of detachment that allowed her to make them, and again I felt that rise of suspicion that was my stunted heart’s mistranslation of a sense of loss. The purchase of Elliot’s car had secretly terrified me, but she had not even really seemed surprised, and I couldn’t help but wonder if before she had begun quietly moving her emotional life to the annex I’d chosen for her, she would have been able to accept a sign of my desperation so serenely. I popped the lids to examine their contents. Frost covered them like a pelt. I parted the hoary filaments on the surface of each one with the edge of its lid, but this revealed almost nothing. Shapes merged. One looked pinker than the others. A tomato sauce probably, but suddenly I couldn’t remember which of her casseroles even contained tomatoes. I picked up the phone and was confronted by the stark fact that she had been working there for three months and I had never tried to call her. I took out the phone book and saw that they had paid extra to have their listing printed in bold-faced type. When I dialed, they answered on the first ring.
“Crisis line. My name is Heather. What’s yours?”
I hadn’t thought this through. “Um
,” I said.
She let a silence fall, and I imagined how this might encourage another kind of man to share his troubles.
I said, “I need to talk to Liz.”
She paused for a second. Then she said, “Okay. Sit tight.”
She put me on hold without sound. I felt a pinch of heat beneath my arms.
Liz came on the line. “Rudy?” she said.
“No, it’s me.”
“Luther?”
“Who’s Rudy?”
“One of our frequent callers,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
I looked down at the casseroles. “That woman, Heather, shouldn’t be giving her name out.”
“It’s not her real name.”
“Oh.” I thought about this. “What’s your fake name?”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah.”
In one container, I saw what was probably a potato; a gray trace of a sausage. A breeze through the open windows raised the hair on my arms.
She said, “Luther, what’s going on? You’ve never called me here before.”
“I just thought I’d check to see what you’d like for dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“I know you won’t be home in time to eat with us, but you might be hungry when you get back.”
The Testing of Luther Albright Page 20
