by Marcus, Ben
“Jules, please. I want to stay with you tonight.”
He crossed the avenue where they’d stopped and she spoke his name, but not so urgently. This is what a favor looks like, he thought. Probably there was a favor being done right now. Except as he turned uphill and left Hayley behind, he had to wonder who, exactly, was actually doing this favor, and who was the fucking favor even for?
It was getting dark. Soon the hostel lights would go off. The men would tuck in and some of them would be snoring in seconds. The whole room would hum with desire, forty or fifty men trying not to be seen for a little while, even if they crept out at large, into the world. They required darkness for their work. This was where Julian belonged. He wanted to be in bed and ready. Maybe if he was lucky, his visitor would return. His visitor might give him another chance. This time he’d stay in his bed, no matter what. He would not bolt. He’d listen all night for footsteps. If none came, then perhaps he would be the stranger. He would find someone sleeping in the Turnhalle, someone who needed badly to be visited, and he would oblige.
Julian would reach out his hand and he wouldn’t say it out loud, but he could certainly think it. He’d been thinking it for so long now. Wouldn’t you like to join me? And wouldn’t that most perfect phrase serve as the prettiest inscription on the tombstone they would finally place, when the time came, over his grave?
Rollingwood
It’s still dark when the weeping erupts, so Mather knows it’s early. How early he isn’t sure, but he won’t be able to fall back asleep, so it doesn’t matter. He pulls the extra pillow over his head, tries to smother the sound, but it’s still there, the distant siren of the boy crying in the other room.
The boy is wedged under the machine when Mather goes in. The machine has run dry again, streaks of pink fluid smeared inside the hose, the tank in the crib issuing an exhausted wheeze. It’s a terrible design. Under the clouded tank is a cavity just large enough to conceal the boy if he crawls in, which is what he does when he wakes up too early and no one comes for him. So Mather has to wedge his fingers beneath the thing, which barely fits in the crib, anyway, and lift it just enough to grab the boy and pull him out.
Of course the boy has been crying. Crying isn’t really the right word for it. He has been explosively weeping, maybe for a long time, and when Mather picks him up and holds him close, the weeping escalates, the boy breaking down in Mather’s arms.
Mather tries to set the boy down in the dark kitchen so that he can make coffee, but as soon as the boy is released he bursts into sobs again. As usual, Mather talks to him, tries to calmly reassure him, but the boy’s crying is so loud that Mather cannot even hear his own voice. He sits on the dirty kitchen floor and gathers the boy in to try to soothe him, but the boy squirms from his grasp and goes on wailing, so Mather leaves the kitchen and shuts himself in the bathroom, triggering even higher-pitched cries from the boy.
When the doorbell rings to signal that Mather’s ride to work is here, he isn’t ready to go. The boy’s diaper was dry when he got up, which meant that he hadn’t had enough water, but Mather could not get him to drink anything. The boy twisted his head away when offered a bottle, so Mather tried to interest him in different cups, even his own coffee mug, which the boy usually tried to pry away from his hands. Finally, the boy took a few greedy gulps from the mug, with most of the water running down his chest. He wouldn’t eat the egg that Mather had prepared for him, but he did steal Mather’s toast, which he squeezed into a gummy mass in his fist while wandering around the living room, still half crying.
Now Mather has to quickly force the boy into his clothing as he struggles to get away. From the hallway, he grabs the same day bag he used yesterday, and the day before, packed with the same spare clothes for the boy and the same dry snacks that he never seems to want.
No one says hello when Mather opens the door of the car-pool vehicle. They have had to wait for him in the unlit garage, and he can tell that they’ve lost patience. There’s no car seat installed today, no space reserved for the boy, and he won’t hold still in Mather’s lap. The woman next to Mather is not amused when the boy throws himself across her legs, trying to crawl toward the window. She sits back, hands up, indicating that Mather must remove the boy himself. Mather apologizes and pulls the boy back, holding him tightly so that he can’t escape. This makes the boy shriek and squirm with surprising strength. But Mather does not relent. He has no real choice.
They pass the old bald hill and the spire, then get waved through at the Faraday gate, where they join the line of cars that form a single file to climb to the top. The little trees out the window are bare and the grass is colorless this time of year, but it’s a bright, clear day. Mather wishes a window was open, but he doesn’t feel that he can ask. No doubt someone decided, before they picked him up, that they’d ride to work with the windows closed, breathing one another’s stale air.
In the parking lot, overlooking the valley, the boy wants to walk under his own power, but there are cars pulling in and it’s too dangerous. Mather finds a little patch of grass for the boy to run around in. It isn’t much, and it quickly drops off into a steep decline, so he stations himself to keep the boy from running down the cliff. For a while the boy staggers around, grabbing little sticks, which he holds up to his father with pride.
When the work bell sounds, Mather lines up at the service entrance and waits his turn for the security check. The boy tenses in Mather’s arms as they approach the nursery, but when Mather hands him off to the caregiver, the boy does not let himself cry. Even at this age, he is trying to be brave. Mather watches through the high window as the boy is quickly placed on the floor of the playroom, in front of a bucket of blocks. The caregiver disappears into an office, but the boy does not seem to notice. He picks something out of the bucket and puts it in his mouth. Mather gives him a last look, then heads up the ramp to the elevator.
The boy is one and a half years old and his name is Alan Mather, and already he has dense black hair on his head. To Mather, Alan is a name not for a baby but for a grown man. When they were naming him, he had let the boy’s mother choose, thinking that he should pick his battles. She had been so sure about it, and Mather had found that he could not think of a single name that didn’t make him feel uneasy when he said it out loud. Mather has tried to call the boy “honey” instead, and maybe if he keeps doing so it will come to feel more natural. The boy has a quiet, wet cough and pink-rimmed eyes, and he’s already capable of sustained, piercing eye contact that his father can never quite match.
At his lunch hour, Mather takes his thermos and sandwich down to the nursery. The boy is in a crib, but he is not asleep. He has the same little foam object in his hand, and it’s been chewed to shreds. When the boy sees Mather, he starts to cry, but softly, as if he had already cried himself hoarse. The respirator in the nursery hasn’t been turned on, and when Mather checks the log to see if the boy has received his medication, there are no entries for today. The boy has the kind of asthma that keeps his lungs from properly lubricating, so he has to inhale moisture through a mask every four hours or his lungs will start to dry out. It’s not serious, the doctor told Mather, but he should try not to miss a treatment. The director of the nursery seemed to be concealing a smirk when Mather first introduced him to the equipment, as if Mather had simply brought in one of Alan’s favorite toys.
After Mather holds the mask to the boy’s face and the boy obediently inhales the wet air, his little brow wrinkled in concentration, they return to the patch of grass outside. Mather tries to eat while the boy sits in his lap, facing downhill. The boy wants to hold Mather’s sandwich, but when Mather lets him he won’t eat any of it, and when Mather tries to rescue the sandwich the boy squishes it into a ball. Mather isn’t hungry for the sandwich, anyway. When he hasn’t slept well, he wants only a sugared muffin with a Coke. His sandwich is cucumbers with olive spread, between slices of thin, black toast, and it smells like potting soil.
It’s
a bright, clear day, and Mather can see all the way down to Rollingwood, the neighborhood where he grew up. He can’t see his old house, but he can see the street where it would be, behind a hooked cul-de-sac of narrow homes. His old elementary school’s clock tower rises out of the trees. The clock stopped at 3:15 a long time ago, and unless you stand beneath the tower you’d think the little hand had fallen off, because it’s perfectly hidden beneath the big hand.
Mather’s son won’t go to school there, because they live far away from Rollingwood now. Mather doesn’t even know where the public schools are in his new neighborhood. It’s not so much a neighborhood as an exit off the freeway, but it’s pretty, in its way, with circular grass parks and housing staggered down the middle. In the spring, it’s one of his favorite parts of town. Something about the absence of trees makes the light seem perfect. It’s hard to imagine that he’ll still be in the same apartment, at the same job, in the same city, when the boy starts kindergarten in a few years. But of course the boy will attend kindergarten wherever his mother is living at the time, so Mather isn’t even sure why he’s thinking about the schools in his neighborhood.
Mather points out landmarks to the boy—the old Rotterman Dam and the shipping depot built of natural black bricks—but the boy doesn’t look. He hangs on Mather’s outstretched arm and tries to swing from it. Mather stands up and swings him around and the boy laughs, but the laugh turns into a whimper, and Mather isn’t sure if the boy is frightened or happy.
After work, they take the bus to the boy’s mother’s apartment, but she isn’t home. She has repeatedly asked Mather to return his key, given to him during friendlier days, but it’s times like this that persuade him to hang on to it. Otherwise he’d be waiting forever on the narrow balcony of her building and the boy would be imperiling himself by trying to squeeze through the bars.
Mather lets himself inside and medicates the boy with the old ventilator in the living room, then looks for something to give him for dinner. There is only a chicken salad, so Mather spreads it on a cutting board and begins chipping it fine. The boy refuses the first spoonful, but Mather leaves the bowl on the coffee table, and after the boy has finished running around the apartment he discovers the mashed chicken and starts to awkwardly feed himself while Mather watches from his chair.
It’s late and dark when the boy’s mother comes home. She’s with her boyfriend, who excuses himself to the bedroom without even taking off his coat. Mather has done his best to accept the boyfriend, has always been cordial and said hello, but the boyfriend won’t look Mather in the eye and never stops to talk.
At these drop-offs, Mather and the boy’s mother, Maureen, do not say much. They confirm the next exchange and discuss Alan’s medication, what he’s eaten, how he’s sleeping. They stick to factual matters and flatten their tone of voice as much as possible, disguising their feelings. But today Maureen says that she needs to talk to him and asks him to sit down.
Mather hides his excitement. Maureen never wants to talk to him. Usually she seems disgusted by his presence, critical of how he fathers the boy, indifferent to anything Mather says that is unrelated to the boy’s care. It is as if she had stored up disappointment that she is determined to show him during the ten minutes they see each other twice a week. So for a moment Mather imagines that Maureen has grown suddenly tender toward him, even with the boyfriend lurking in the bedroom. She misses Mather, maybe, and would like to talk to someone who really knows her. Someone who understands, because they once went through a lot together.
Except that’s not it. Maureen needs a favor. She tells him that she can’t take the boy right now. She’s going away tomorrow.
“Okay,” Mather says carefully, wanting to sound cooperative. He’d love to do her a favor, because she thinks he is selfish. If he shows resistance, she’ll be upset and they’ll have another fight.
“Thanks for understanding,” Maureen says. “I appreciate it.” She gets up as if the discussion is over.
But Mather doesn’t understand. What is she telling him?
“I guess we need to wake up Alan,” Maureen says, and she heads for the curtained-off hallway where Mather put him to sleep in the portable crib.
“Where are you going, can I ask?” Mather says. He’s not sure why he sounds apologetic.
“To Robert’s hometown.”
Robert is the boyfriend. Mather thinks that Robert is lucky to be alone in a dark room right now. Maybe Robert is standing at the door, still wearing his winter coat, listening to them.
“Why can’t you take Alan? It’s your turn. He can’t go with you?”
“No. Alan can’t come.”
“Well, when are you coming back?”
“Really soon. I’ll call you. I’ll make up the days.”
“So you’re just going off in the middle of the workweek?”
Maureen looks at him sharply, and it’s clear that she doesn’t think she needs to explain herself. She picks up the boy and starts whispering to him, her voice losing its scolding tone, dissolving into singsong. She bounces and hushes him, even though he’s not crying.
The boy clings to his mother. When she bends over the couch to change him, he clutches her as if he were a baby animal, and she has to peel him away. She tells the boy that he will be staying with his daddy for a little while longer, and that she will miss him so much. She will see him soon, and they will do fun things and she will give him lots of kisses because he’s her little boy, isn’t he, and she wants to kiss him all the time. Should they go on a boat ride when she comes home? Does he remember the boat ride they once took? Would he like to do that again? That’s what they’ll do. She’ll come home and they’ll go down to the river and take a nice boat ride.
Mather stands there in the dark living room. There won’t be a boat ride. He knows that. She’s showering so much love on the boy that he will become dazed by it, then Mather will have to take over and the boy will be bitterly disappointed again. To Mather, these intense displays of love are what he must help the boy recover from. Fatherhood has somehow become about helping the boy not love his mother too painfully.
Maureen hands the boy off to Mather, and the boy registers the change for one perfectly quiet second, then screams. He’s never liked parting from his mother, and now they’ve woken him up late at night only to make him suffer the sudden separation. Mather closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. There’s nothing he can do. He’d like Maureen to seem more obviously guilty, but she shows no sign of having done anything wrong. It is, apparently, Mather’s fault that the boy does not love him with the same terrible desperation.
There’s no one else at the bus stop, and from what Mather can tell, after reading the posted schedule, the next bus will come in one minute, which is lucky for him, because the boy is not pleased, outside in the winter at night. Except when one minute passes, then two, then five, it becomes clear that the bus must have come already and now the next one isn’t due for half an hour.
Alone, which is what he was supposed to be tonight, Mather wouldn’t care. He’d sit on the bench and read, enjoying the cold night. But he has the boy with him, and the boy is fully awake after all his screaming and will be cold soon. This isn’t the sort of area where empty taxicabs drive around looking for fares. Mather calls information and gets the number for a car service, then speaks to a dispatcher. They can send a driver in forty-five minutes. Mather tells the man that it’s late and his baby is tired and hungry, and the man repeats that he can send a car in forty-five minutes. More like an hour, actually, to be honest—as if he were doing Mather a favor by lengthening the estimate.
Mather starts to walk home, carrying the boy, along the bus route, even though it’s less direct. He figures that the bus, when it comes, won’t cruelly pass him by if he stands in the road and waves. The roads are so empty that Mather wonders for a moment if something terrible has happened, and everyone is at home watching the news, knowing better than to go outside. He stops walking and listens. It’
s the quietest he’s ever heard his city. The boy, too, seems transfixed, staring into the darkness. But then a bus rolls into sight and Mather stands right over the white line, waving. He doesn’t want to take any chances.
Maureen doesn’t call the next day, or the day after that, and then it’s the weekend. On Sunday, Mather’s parents visit, but they’re so tired they don’t leave their chairs. Mather’s parents have been to Lisbon, and they tell him of eating fish seared on the rocks at the harbor. The flat rocks are heated by torches overnight, and when the morning’s catch comes in a man cleans whole fish to order and lays them out, butterflied, on the hot stone, which is black and oily from the cooking. When you salt this fish, it’s the best thing you’ve ever eaten. You eat it with your fingers. Even the locals eat it, which, of course, is the best endorsement.
Mather’s father studies him for signs of enthusiasm.
Mather nods his approval and says that he’d love to try it sometime.
The boy goes to the front hallway and grabs his little white shoes, then brings them over to Mather. Then he carries first one, then the other, of Mather’s old maroon work shoes, dumping them loudly at Mather’s feet.
“He wants to go out,” Mather mumbles.
Mather’s parents smile with abstract pleasure but do not move.
When he doesn’t hear from Maureen by Monday afternoon, Mather calls and gets her voice mail. He would like to know her plans. The boy is doing fine, he tells her. He’s actually eating, and he gets up twice at night, but Mather downgrades this to once in his message, because somehow the extra night wakings might seem like his failure. He asks Maureen to get back to him so that he knows when to drop Alan off.
He gets no call the next day. The day after that, at work, the nursery is closed. The lights are off and the door is locked when Mather carries the boy over in the morning. Mather waits outside while his colleagues head upstairs. He calls the nursery number and gets no answer. He bangs on the dark glass. Finally, when he is going to be late for work, he takes the boy up the ramp to the elevators and brings him into the suite of offices.
