When I arrived to open my account, Liz was sitting behind a wooden desk in front of the vault, trifolding sheets of paper into envelopes. The Wells Fargo Bank on J Street had large windows, and when I entered the bank for the first time, the room was warm with early sun. I was wearing the winter coat, and when I approached her desk, I was sweating. She licked her finger before she separated another page from her stack. Although she seemed a businesslike distance from me when seated, she stood as I cleared my throat to speak, bringing her face startlingly close to mine.
“Yes?” she said.
“I want to rent a safe-deposit box.”
She opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out a form. When she sat, I did too and began to fill it out, my pulse racing. I could feel the weight of the gun on my hip. I said, “Who besides me will have access to the box?”
“Nobody. It takes two keys to open, and you’ve got one of them.”
“The bank doesn’t have copies of the customer keys?”
She cocked her head. “Well, sure, but we can’t open it without your permission.”
“Who has access to those keys?”
“Without a signature from you? Just the bank president, I’m guessing.” She smiled at me. “But then again, my dad’s the bank president, so I could cop it while he’s sleeping and snoop through your drawer no problem.”
I must have looked stricken because she said, “Relax! I’m only kidding!”
When I went back to my apartment that night, I regretted leaving the pistol in the vault. Between the sweating and the interrogation and the panicky looks, I had acted so suspiciously, I was sure that she would open the box to see what I had been so eager to protect. I might simply have retrieved the gun and closed the account the next morning, but I’ll admit already I was drawn to her, and somehow the solution of going often enough to become something less than a lunatic to her compelled me.
The next day, I stopped by a pawn shop and purchased four rolls of wheat pennies and set them in a biscuit tin similar to the one that contained my father’s pistol. I did this half-a-dozen times, until finally, with the boldness I was counting on, she asked me what was in the tin, and I lifted the lid, printed with a scene of snowy New England, to let her see. I think it was then, after a bell’s peal of laughter that made heads turn in the teller line, that she asked me out for that dinner.
Now, standing alone on my front lawn waiting for the sewer smell to dissipate, I had the strange thought that were it not for my father’s pistol, I might have lived alone in this house, without dread or confusion about the way my crimes of emotion were yielding results so similar to his own.
I went inside and closed all of the windows. The smell was gone, but as I began to puzzle through the evidence again, I felt a sort of exhaustion. Hiring a plumber to repeat the time-consuming battery of tests I’d already performed was very unlikely to yield a better answer than I had been able to come up with myself, and seemed a concession of defeat. And finally—of course it no longer seems strange now—I thought of the one person to whom I felt I had nothing left to concede.
When I arrived in the parking lot, I stood outside for a moment, looking in. Larry’s wife stood at the counter watching her television. She had dumped the contents of her purse on the counter, and she was pawing through them without looking. When her hand found a container of Tic Tacs, she flipped it open, shook one into her palm, and popped it in her mouth. I pushed through the door, and she gestured at the screen as if I had been there with her watching all along. “Sisters who’re best friends, what do you think about that?”
“Excuse me?”
“These are my favorites. They do it all the time. Happy people who love each other silly. By the end, they’re holding them in their chairs.” She rolled her eyes. “How’s your boy?”
“He’s fine.”
“What did I tell you?” She winked. “So what’s the problem. Another clog?”
And here I surprised myself. Although I would have expected it to embarrass me to do so, instead of answering her, I looked down at the counter at the contents of her purse—a dirty pink wallet, a pack of Juicy Fruit gum, Chap Stick, Tic Tacs, a brush fleeced with a mat of her hair, dental floss, a wrapped tampon, some change. I am sixty-five years old and I think I have a glimmer of understanding now, but for many years any memory of this meeting with Larry’s wife made me feel some combination of discouragement and vertigo—a brief panicky glimpse at the unfathomable Rube Goldberg workings that controlled my mind and heart. I had come for her help, and although every element that had so annoyed me in our previous encounters was magnified here—her inappropriate familiarity, her condescension, her vulgar jokes about human nature—somehow under the very circumstances when they should have unnerved me the most they did not bother me at all. They were almost a comfort.
“Tic Tac?” she said.
“Sure.”
She picked up the box and shook one into my palm. I put it in my mouth. She took a second one for herself and said, “So what kind of trouble have you got yourself into this time?”
“A little case of trap-seal loss,” I said.
She cracked the mint between her molars. “Could be an arm-over vent in the attic full of water. Larry’s brother saw that once.”
“I already opened the wall to check for sagging.”
“Yikes. You have been busy. Well, it’s one of six things. Design error, which is my bet. Or if the design is decent, somewhere in there you probably jimmied something.”
“I don’t think—”
“Well, how old’s your house?”
“Twenty-two years.”
“That’s a lot of time for mistakes. A repair or a new sink or something. You’re in here a lot after all.” She smiled slyly. “I could come take a look if you want.”
“What are the other five?”
She counted them off on her fingers: “Piece of string drawing water down the drain. Evaporation, which isn’t likely. Clogged vent, like I said. Cracked drain pipe. You’ve done the smoke test already; where’d the smoke come out?”
“Just the vent.”
“You could’ve missed some spots.”
“What’s the sixth?”
“What?”
“You said there were six.”
She looked at her fingers. “Oh, yeah. It never happens. I’ve never heard of it once. It was just in the book we had to read for the boys’ licensing exam.”
“What is it?”
“Wind effect.” She shook her head. “Supposedly wind can get channeled down the vent and suck the trap empty. But I think the botched repair’s more likely. It said the wind thing was rare, and it doesn’t seem like the type of thing that would just start happening all of a sudden. Something about the roof design has to whip it down there.”
My chest filled. “Actually, I added two dormers last summer.”
“And a do-it-yourself bathroom maybe?”
“Let’s say it was wind effect….”
She rolled her eyes.
I said, “Is there something simple that can be done to stop it from happening again?”
She laughed.
I said, “Maybe something you can sell me?”
“Now you’re talkin’. How about trap primers?”
“Trap primers?”
“They use them mostly in public bathrooms on the traps under floor drains. The drains are required, but they don’t get much use unless a toilet overflows; so the seal evaporates. The primer taps the supply line for a little water whenever it gets low,” she said. She picked up the box of Tic Tacs and handed it to me. Then she stepped around the counter to lead me to the back of the store.
It would be difficult to characterize the relief I felt except to say that it’s the kind I’ve experienced only a few times in my life, a kind of flight inside the chest and a buzzing in the skull that even in a person driving alone in a car can produce a sudden, irrepressible bubble of laughter. I switched the radio on, and when I found som
ething vaguely triumphant, I turned it loud. All week a sense of loss I’d been channeling unexamined into paranoia had me imagining Liz greeting other people’s children at some preschool or whispering over a table in a bistro to a man named Rudy. It held me back from any kind of action, and something in me knew that whatever the truth was, an affair or a job, the only path towards eliminating these secrets began with conversation. I had resolved sometime in the middle of last night to try to initiate more of this, and now when I parked outside the Crisis Center and looked up at the window above, I tried to picture her there, listening to a stranger’s worries across the telephone lines because I would not share my own. A pigeon lit on the brick sill outside the window and struggled for balance. A boy spilled a bag of fried chicken on the sidewalk and birds swarmed around him, a cloud of dark wings. In the end, it was simply the sudden thought that Liz might not be there at all—might be pursuing her own secret life—that made me lose my will. It seemed more than my fragile excitement could bear.
Instead, I drove to the bank to withdraw the money Elliot had said he needed. Over the last two days, I had given it some thought. He was a smart boy, and although we had never discussed it directly, I was pretty sure that if asked he could make a fair guess about the size of my savings. In hindsight it seemed much more likely that his impulse to get a job had stemmed from a genuine feeling that I was too far removed from his life now to be able to imagine the urgency he attached to his new social expenses. I will admit that it was mostly competitive insecurity about the implications of this that made me want to surprise him with a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.
He was home when I got there, eating a bowl of Cheerios at the kitchen table. He looked up at me when I came through the door.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hello.” I put my hand in my pocket. “I’ve got that money for you.”
“What money?” he said.
He has grown into a kind and respectful man. He has two small children of his own now, both of whom will consent to being comforted by him when injured even if their mother is also available. I wish I could by some miracle have known this then. It might have given me better access to my sympathy for him, because as it was, within seconds any tenderness I felt was obscured almost totally by anger. I closed my eyes for a second. Behind the walls of a house, I told myself, pipes do not always run straight….
I said, “The money you needed a part-time job to earn.”
“Oh, right,” he said.
It wasn’t until then that it occurred to me that he didn’t really need the money, and in retrospect, what amazes me most is not his lie, but that it took me so long to identify it. I can, I suppose, claim some counterbalancing shrewdness in the fact that by two thirty that morning standing barefoot on my lawn listening to the strangely stressful pulse of crickets, it had occurred to me that it was not the only lie he had told me.
The next morning, I stopped by Nathan’s office unannounced. He was eating breakfast from McDonald’s: hash browns fried into an oval and served in a paper sleeve. He had just taken a bite—too hot—and he made a little “o” of his mouth to cool it.
I said, “Listen, I won’t stay long, but I wanted you to know that I feel I’ve made a mistake.”
He finished chewing and swallowed. “What?”
“I’m embarrassed by my vacillation, but all I can say is my son has been going through a tough time, and I overreacted worrying about the travel. If you’ve still got an opening, I’d like to reapply.”
He set his hash browns down. “You’re killing me, Luther. We offered it to the guy from L.A. the day after you turned us down. He starts next week.”
“I understand. I figured that was probably the case.”
“And he’s a good guy, too.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“He turned down Bechtel for us.”
I nodded. Outside, rain had just started. It had been so dry lately, the soil in the empty median planters had turned to dust, and the big drops stirred it, little plumes of red smoke. It was a strange sight.
He said, “Candidly? I’d rather have you because I’ve worked with you before. You’re a known quantity. That’s why I offered it to you first. But I can’t back out of the offer.”
“I understand.”
“I mean, technically? I could do it, but I won’t.”
“I respect that.”
The rain was loud, and he looked over his shoulder to see it. “Looks like a big one.”
“Yes.”
We both watched it a minute. Over the last few months, even the sight of clouds had made me tense, but last night I had installed the trap primers while Elliot tinkered with the drive train for a go-kart in the basement. Then I had closed all the windows. I used the thought of this to soothe myself—to slow my heart.
“Shoot, Luther,” Nathan said.
“I know.” I wiped my palms on my thighs. “I don’t suppose you could use two people.”
He laughed. He shook his head, eyeing me. “It’s just not in the budget.”
“I could work for a percentage of the business I bring in for a while.”
“You’re killing me again.”
I held up a hand. “I understand.”
He took another bite of his hash browns now, cool enough to allow him to consume half the oval in a single bite. My heart fluttered inside my chest. Something about the way he chose to take a bite then instead of thanking me for stopping by. I could tell he was thinking about it. “The truth is we probably can use the help.”
I waited.
“There’s this big job we’re about to land. I never thought they’d give it to us, but if they do, we’re going to be stretched really thin.”
I said nothing.
“You could have a job with anyone looking, Luther. You really want me to call you if we get the contract?”
I scratched my chin in an effort to make it appear I was weighing this, but the truth is the odd carrel of loneliness I had erected for myself in the busy front-room of my family life made me yearn with unreasonable urgency for a second chance at a job with him—a man who could not inhibit himself even from eating fried potatoes to keep his heart from bursting. It seemed best to hide this.
“Sure,” I said. “I want to take the right thing with the right company. I’m going to keep talking to people, but call me when you know, and we’ll see where I am.”
“Okay.” He lifted the empty white paper bag and peered inside as if looking for more food. The meeting was over, and a stronger man might have risen and left at this point, but my curiosity overwhelmed me. I told myself it would be useful in my dealings with Elliot to know for sure.
I took that box of Tic Tacs from my pocket and opened it. I put one in my mouth and set the box on his desk. Then I said, “I ran into Robert yesterday.”
He reached across the table for the Tic Tacs. “Who?”
“Belsky.”
He put a mint in his mouth and furrowed his brow, thinking. “I’m terrible with names.”
“He worked in Design with us at the Department.”
“The guy with the limp?”
“No, that was Burt Sage. He left a while ago. Belsky’s the one with the red hair and the really loud laugh.”
“Loud laugh,” he said. “I guess I don’t remember him.”
8 The Gun
TWO MONTHS LATER, I HAD MY LAST CHANCE WITH BOTH OF them. Maybe if I had been better at imagining the future, I might have seen the moments for what they were and made different choices. I think about that sometimes. I think of my parents, and I even begin to feel sorry for my father, who for all his mistakes, I finally understand, was merely trying to wrench from my mother the same depth of intimacy Elliot was trying to wrench from me. After that year, Elliot would get some of what he needed from Belsky, who invited all of us on winter ski trips I tactfully declined but let Elliot attend. Then he would go away to college and fall in love with a woman so frank that when she first met us she conf
essed she’d dreamt she showed up for our dinner wearing nothing but the tam-o’-shanter from her old Brownie uniform, and half an hour later, in a fish restaurant not far from campus, she asked me how I’d really felt all those years ago when Elliot had shaved his head. Her manner caught me off guard, and I changed the subject quickly, but in my better moments I was happy that my son had found someone with whom he could share his secrets.
As for Liz, she would grow happier in most ways than I had ever seen her, and maybe it was this that would for a time confuse me into thinking my evasions had done no permanent harm. Her volunteer work gave her a confidence about her abilities that our family life never had, and it transformed her into a more sure-footed version of the bold and expressive woman I had known at the bank, so that briefly I was able to fool myself that in driving her to the Crisis Center, instead of hurting her, I had given her some kind of gift. Her sisters sensed the change in her over the telephone wires and began to turn to her in times of trouble. Eleanor got divorced a second time, Pam lost a child in a traffic accident, Charlotte went through a painful bankruptcy with her husband, and each of them in turn showed up at our house to stay awhile in Elliot’s attic bedroom and receive Liz’s comforts. She always knew just what they needed. Eleanor she sat up with until two in the morning drinking wine and exhausting her stores of both tears and laughter, and with Pam she read silently on the patio, sipping tea.
From time to time, she would lash out at me in the way that she had early in our marriage: the night Elliot’s girlfriend asked me what I’d felt about the head shaving, for example, when surprise and a decade of distance made me answer more honestly than I ever had for Liz (“I was terrified,” I said); one anniversary when some uncomfortable mixture of hopeful humor and morbid curiosity drove her to give me a set of proof Eisenhower dollars, and despite the obviousness of the unspoken lie my old collection represented by then, I still feigned a collector’s excitement about the gift; and once when I would not join her in a conga line on the last night of a cruise to Acapulco. It was a cruise she’d tried to persuade Elliot and Gina to take with us, and she was probably just exhausted by the strain of passing the week without blaming their gentle refusal to come along on me.
The Testing of Luther Albright Page 23
