The Testing of Luther Albright

by MacKenzie Bezos

  She didn’t seem to know what to say to this.

  I said, “I like the ham and bean.”

  “Okay.”

  “Is there ham and bean in the freezer?”

  “I think so.”

  “How can I tell?”

  “Smell for mustard.”

  “Mustard.”

  Above me, I heard the thrum of water filling our son’s bathtub, and right away I braced myself. These days any plumbing sounds would wake me from a deep sleep, as did breezes and outdoor noises, all of them taunts.

  “Luther,” Liz said, “are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Sure I am.”

  “Where’s Elliot?”

  “Upstairs.” I leaned over the counter and inhaled, and the scent came to me, sharp and clear. “Oh, here it is. Thank you. See you tonight.”

  I served it in front of the television, because lately this seemed to be what he wanted. Remote controls were new then, and when I had purchased our first I had surrendered it without argument to Elliot’s restless command. Now he settled in an armchair with his plate balanced on his knees and flipped through the channels: Pat Sajak clapping for the passage of dollars on his giant wheel, a woman soaking her fingers in dish soap, a map of Sacramento County troubled by paper clouds. He paused on what appeared to be the scene of a dinner party in a banquet hall. White streamers hung from the ceiling, and above a dance floor sparkled a giant mirrored ball. When a man in a bright white uniform and cap approached a table of elderly couples, I recognized it as The Love Boat, and to my surprise, Elliot set the remote on the side table and picked up his fork.

  I had seen the show probably half-a-dozen times, and from this it had not been difficult to glean that the formula involved the problems of three different couples aboard a cruise ship. It seemed to me that at the age of fifteen, with a new girlfriend, and after the awkwardness about the underwear in his bathroom, he was fairly likely to be uncomfortable watching a show about romance with me—particularly one in which the sex lives of characters was a frequent topic. But no sooner had I completed this thought than it came to me that it was my own discomfort he would be trying to stir. So I braced myself, and, as absurd as I knew they would be, I settled in to focus on the plots.

  The first appeared to be about the fiancée of a powerful congressman who was worried that a nude photo she had taken long ago for an erotic magazine would jeopardize her husband’s political career. The second was about a divorced couple—a chef and a waitress—who by coincidence were hired at the same time by the cruise line and wind up trapped together in the ship’s meat locker. And the third was about a newlywed couple who are prevented by dislocated backs, sunburn, and poison ivy from consummating their wedding vows. I guessed early on that it would be at some point during their disastrously painful attempts to have sex that he would try to set some kind of conversational trap for me, but he was silent throughout each of these, and in the end, it was the divorced couple’s plot that drew his only comment.

  During their entrapment in the freezer, they had gone through several stages. First they had tried to busy themselves with escape, interrupting their debates about method with an awkward exchange of news about their lives since the divorce. After the commercial break, they shifted their attention to trying to keep warm. As they ran through options for raising their body temperature, it seemed obvious where this plot was going, but ripe as this inevitable climax might be with opportunities to make me feel awkward in his company, it was at some point during one of the less suggestive conversations that Elliot shook his head and laughed through his nose.

  I could sense his eyes sliding in my direction. I tried to guess what he was fishing for, but at the time, it eluded me completely.

  “People are so fake,” he said finally.

  On-screen, the man was removing his shoes and socks. The woman was sitting on a cardboard box with her arms pulled inside the body of her tuxedo shirt telling him about a movie star who had come into her restaurant.

  Elliot said, “They always pretend the opposite of what they’re really feeling.”

  The chef pulled his socks over his hands and clapped them together with satisfaction. The waitress kept on with her story: how the actor asked for her phone number; how he invited her to a five-course dinner on his yacht.

  Elliot made the noise again. “They never say what they mean. They’re so fake.”

  When I felt his eyes settle on me, I nodded, because my agreement seemed important to him, but I felt somehow afraid to engage him with words. Although up until this point he had stolen occasional glances at me, his concentration seemed to deepen during the next scenes. The temptation to simply leave him there absorbed and do the vaguely humiliating snaking job alone was strong, but I suspected he would detect the shame behind this impulse. So instead I waited impatiently for the credits to roll and then clapped my hands and suggested we head upstairs.

  Although before he moved into the attic he’d kept his bathroom neat, recently there had been a change. He still put his toothbrush and comb in his medicine cabinet after use, but he didn’t wipe the countertop around the washbasin as he once did. Water pooled there, and in the late afternoon, a faint outline of mineral deposits and the residue of soap marked their outer boundaries. The lower half of his mirror was flecked with toothpaste, and, in the sink basin, short hairs rimmed the drain like iron filings. We kneeled together on his bath mat, and dampness left there by his morning shower bled through the knees of my work pants. I worried that as the same happened to him he would be embarrassed by this. Our elbows touched, and he moved away from me to give me space, one knee on the tile. For a second, I thought I might tell him he wasn’t crowding me. Instead, I said nothing. I was feeding the tip of the snake down the tub drain when he said, “I’m sorry I didn’t meet you.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “It was irresponsible.”

  “It wasn’t so bad; I like hanging out at Briggs.”

  When he didn’t say more, I flipped the switch on the snake, and he stared at me as it hummed loudly between us. Then he did a funny thing. He took off his glasses. I didn’t think he could see me clearly when he did this, but my own vision has always been good. It’s difficult for me to know what my son saw.

  I waited.

  He looked up at the ceiling, and I noted, as I often had in the year since he entered high school, that his throat was no longer a boy’s throat. He swallowed hard, and his Adam’s apple moved inside him, large.

  Although he was only a foot from me, the snake was so loud I had to raise my voice a little. I said, “You’re trying to tell me something.”

  He laughed, in shock I think. “Yeah.” But then he said nothing.

  I said, “This whole thing is a little unsettling.”

  He nodded. The snake was turning freely inside the pipe, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn it off.

  I said, “It is for me too. It’s frustrating not to know exactly what the problem is.”

  In absence of his glasses, I could see that the skin under his eyes was dark, and I had a father’s yearning to set him at ease. Having given voice to something awkward, I thought maybe a change of subject might be the best tactic, but I had trouble thinking of anything uncomplicated to discuss. I sifted through a few options, and finally, I’m embarrassed to say that what came out under pressure was this:

  “The FDA approved a new sweetener.”

  He looked at me.

  “They’re calling it Nutrasweet.”

  “Dad,” he said, “I’m thinking about getting a part-time job this summer.”

  I tried to steady my voice. “Why?”

  He closed his eyes and rubbed them with his thumb and middle finger as if they were sore, but I could see that he was trying to remove traces of moisture. I’d been employed without interruption for twenty-two years, and I’d had three high-paying job offers in the four weeks since my resignation. I had thirty thousand dollars in the bank, and another hundred and
fifty in a conservative bond portfolio that a less responsible man would have long since been seduced into selling for fast-moving stocks. We lived in one of the nicest suburbs in Sacramento. We had three new cars. There had been no signs, ever, anywhere in his childhood of financial instability, but, in spite of all of this, somehow in the context of my apparent failures—the plumbing, my job loss, my parenting—I wondered if my son had also begun to doubt our security. I said, “Not for money, surely.”

  The fingers stopped on his lids. For a matter of seconds he was perfectly still. Then he put his glasses back on and looked me in the eye. “Yes. It’s the money.”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  “Well, I was kind of short on cash this month.”

  “Of course you were. You’re getting older. You go out with friends; you have a car. But you can have whatever you need.”

  He looked at me. The snake was still turning.

  I said, “How much do you need?”

  “A hundred dollars.”

  “No problem,” I said, and I turned to switch off the snake.

  Treating every drain in the house took a little over two hours, and left each bathroom smelling faintly of sewage. Although I tried to let it go, as we worked, I kept tallying the changed features of his private life—different clothes, more meals out, movies and sporting events, extra gas for longer drives than I’d been imagining—and my failure to anticipate the increase in his needs seemed just one more measure of the distance between us. We pulled up some hair, a few orange peels, and once heard a cracking noise that left a few fragments of bright red plastic on the tip of the snake. I made as much of this as I could, ignoring the smell, and when we were finished, tried to undercut the sense of failure stirred by the conversation about money and the strong feeling that nothing conclusive had been learned or solved by declaring it safe to close the windows. We started together in the living room and then split up, and he was already upstairs before I saw that the task would lead us naturally to our bedrooms without saying good night.

  I got ready for bed, but instead of trying to sleep, for the first time in weeks, I waited up for Liz to return from the swing shift. I still believed in most ways I had been a good husband. Certainly, she had never complained. Or she only complained, in the midst of our infrequent arguments, about little things: that I was inflexible; that I was too tidy; and once, that I was repressed, although when I pushed her on this point, she would not explain what she meant. While that one always bothered me, I used to try to convince myself that it is one of the things someone says in the heat of argument that is based less on reality than a desire to upset.

  We were in the car; Liz was driving, and we were talking about the miscarriages. She had just had a third, and when she forgot to signal at the traffic light, I reached over and did it for her. It’s true that it was not important from a safety standpoint to signal there, but I’d been generally worried about her level of distraction as she talked, and was pleased in some unexamined, reflexive way to be able to do something to supplement her attention to the cause of getting us home. I just reached over and did it.

  “Are you even listening to me!?”

  “I’ve heard everything you’ve said.”

  She looked over both shoulders, too quickly to take anything in. “There’s no one around to even see that signal! We’re alone on the road, and I just told you something amazing; something I’ve spent almost six years trying to find out, and you’re thinking about traffic law.”

  “I’m not. It was a reflex. I heard everything you said. If people couldn’t listen and think about driving at the same time, talking in cars would be illegal.”

  “There! See! You’re still thinking about traffic law!”

  “I’m just proving my point.”

  “Then what did I say?”

  “You said, ‘Forget about the disappointment, maybe I wasn’t even meant to be a mother.’”

  And she burst into tears. There were no cars behind us; so we just sat there at the traffic light. This is what she had said verbatim, and I guessed it must have stung to hear it again. I reached over and took her shoulders in my arms and pulled her towards me. I will admit I was tempted to put the car in park before I did it, I did have that thought, but of course I resisted. It was true there was almost no traffic on the road, and I was frantic to calm her. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

  I had meant for the situation, for the fact that we were having so much trouble having a child, but she took it as apology: “It’s the way you say things sometimes. How can you just repeat something that awful like it’s something you read out of the newspaper?”

  The possibility that she was sobbing so hard not about the miscarriages, but about me, came as a shock. I pulled back. “You asked me what you said. You asked me.”

  “Oh you are so repressed,” she said, and she sat back and put her hands on the wheel.

  “What?”

  She turned left onto Sunrise Boulevard.

  I said, “We were talking about the miscarriages.”

  “Babies.”

  “Okay, babies.”

  Her jaw was set.

  I said, “What do you mean?” Neon signs made colors on her face. I said, “That could have been an example of insensitivity, or anal retentiveness, but not repression.”

  She did not respond. But later that night, when I asked again, she reached over a hand in the dark and put it to my cheek without even having to grope, and this gesture would almost have been enough on its own, but she also said, “I take it back.” It made me feel better, until the next morning when brushing my teeth alone in the bathroom I realized with a sudden, evidenceless conviction only people who have been married a few years can feel, that she had done this not because she felt her words had been unfair, but because she felt their truth was more than I could take.

  The next week, I went with her to a lab in an office tower near the Hyatt. I was holding her hand, and I tried to measure my slight steps to match the pace of the conveyor belt as it eased her body into a big white doughnut. When the doctor found us in the waiting room later and asked us to come to his office, my pulse leapt. Liz’s palm was sweating, but I did not let go. She had three small fibroids, he said, and we had a number of options. Liz interrupted to ask to see the picture on the sheet of acetate he was holding on his crossed knees. When he handed it to her, she held it halfway between us so I could see, but I had a number of questions for the doctor. I ticked resolutely through them: frequency of recurrence after surgery, likelihood of reproductive success, surgical risks and percentage of fibroids that become cancerous. It seemed to me surgery was a good idea, and I turned to her and said so, and she looked up from the shiny sheets then with much the same look she had worn in the car when I flicked the turn signal.

  I was thinking about this, sitting up in bed with an open magazine I had not even glanced through, when I finally heard her footfall on the stairs. One twenty-six. My heart quickened when I saw her.

  “You’re still up,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes bright. She opened her pocket book and took out a roll of butterscotch Lifesavers. “Want one?”

  “No, thank you.”

  She peeled back a bit of the waxed paper and foil and put one in her mouth. It was a small thing, but I had never seen her take Lifesavers from her purse before. She did not even really eat candy.

  “So,” I said. “How was your day?”

  She looked at her pocketbook. “Oh, gosh. Same old, same old.”

  I didn’t know what she meant, and the realization that in all her descriptions of work I had never noticed a common thread was disconcerting. “The same kind of callers?”

  “Mhm.”

  “Like what?”

  “Let’s see. A woman who said the only time she feels like a whole person is when she’s alone in the bathroom. Her husband’s a urologist, and he thinks she has a bladder infection. That’s why he thinks she g
oes so often.” She opened and shut her purse again. “Another caller was a man who said whenever he looks in the mirror he sees this very small version of himself. Sometimes when he gets to work he sits in his car for as much as twenty minutes with the engine idling.”

  The image of her holding the receiver to her cheek and listening to these strangers’ fears filled me with something I could not name. I said, “That’s a good thing you’re doing.”

  She shrugged.

  “Really.”

  A hand rose to her neck. “Thanks.”

  “It’s very kind.”

  She took her earrings off—one, and then the other—and palmed them.

  I said, “Do you enjoy it at all—listening to those people’s problems?”

  “It feels like the right thing to do.”

  “I mean for your own sake.”

  “Not really,” she said. She took her necklace off with two hands, like a yoke. She was still wearing her clothes, her shoes; her pocketbook lay on the bedspread; but somehow this removal made her look naked. Maybe it was the way she held herself—shyly—as she never did when she took off her robe to step into the shower or surprised me by pulling back the bedsheet to expose her own bareness, but as she often did when I asked her to remove the towel she had pressed to her body or lingered by the door of the closet to watch her undress. Her eyes fluttered from me. “I mean, of course not. No.”

  I wondered for the first time if she might shower before coming to bed, and when she did not, a sickening, double-agent’s kind of courage came to me. She slipped between the sheets, and I pulled her towards me beneath them to check for another man’s smell. Her muscles tensed, at first, in surprise, but then she buried her face in my neck, and the soft sweep of her nose and lips against the skin there brought first relief, and then panic, and then shame. All three of them stayed. She sat me up and removed my shirt. In my excitement closing the windows, I had done a teenager’s job on the shades, and now the barest trace of moonlight through the new elm leaves graced her arms and cheek before she laid us down again. In a weird act of will, I made myself imagine how her control might excite another man. But then I lost track of all of these feelings until afterwards when exhaustion came and laid a heavy blanket on my thoughts and limbs that only the most persistent kind of anxiety can invade. Sarah, it said. Sarah.