by Amy Seek
He opened the door and slipped out, pulling it closed behind him so I wouldn’t see or be seen or be inadvertently invited into the gathering of people inside. I said, “Happy birthday!” and handed him the banana bread wrapped in aluminum foil. He narrowed his eyes and exhaled sharply through his mouth. He took the loaf in one hand but did not receive it; he held it away from his body as though I’d asked him to carry it for me, and he continued to observe me, smiling skeptically, as if, given enough time, I might do something else absurd. “Thanks,” he said, as if to say, It could never be simple with us.
* * *
Years ago, during that phase of our relationship when we were deep in but still discovering so much about each other, Jevn told me about his father. He said when his father used to drink, he would look out the car window to see how swervy the lines on the road were getting, to gauge whether he might need to jump out. And he measured people like that; if they wavered, he fled. I wanted him to embrace the new me, who had come so far to get here, on his doorstep, saying, “Happy birthday!” but I had been so many things by then, so many unforeseen storms of rage, so many pitch-black midnights. How could he trust this system to stay? He put one hand behind him on the doorknob and stood, silent, letting the stillness expand between us.
I turned away and told myself I would never step on this sidewalk, walk turn down the street where he lived, ever again. What was wrong with making banana bread for someone’s birthday?
I stormed home, abandoning my innocently contrived plans for peace; now I was fuming and felt ready for war. This bridge could not be built. He had always been my enemy. Why had I aligned myself with him for even a moment? Why had I let him weigh in on my pregnancy, as if he had as much to lose as I did? As if he had anything to do with me at all? I couldn’t believe I’d let him make me feel guilty for my indecision about signing the papers. It was easy for him—there was no metamorphosis in fatherhood! No bloody extraction, no heartbreaking soul-splitting, no wrenching in two that might account for some duplicity. I emerged broken and torn, while he remained faultless, steady, and true. I couldn’t help it if motherhood was messy, and I didn’t care if he couldn’t help it, either—I couldn’t forgive him for being a father.
But then what was that moment, the labor and birth? A magical truce when we forgot our grievances. Jevn had been so present there, trusting my pain and leaping to help me, but he wasn’t in focus for me, then. He was just a comforting figure on the distant horizon. When it was over and Jonathan was born, we’d been through something together that was bigger than both of us and our complicated relationship. It seemed it should change everything. Maybe I hoped he would ask me again, and, all our walls torn down, that I would find a way to say yes. It was days later, I was dropping tears on Jonathan’s chest, when I realized that that distant figure had always, at least since last December, been walking away.
Seeing Jevn’s distinctive features in Jonathan—in his eyes, in his smile, in his beginnings of a posture—made me hope there were other good things already built in, like Jevn’s intelligence and care. But it wasn’t fair that I had to let go of Jevn while experiencing a brand-new fascination for someone who looked just like him. Sometimes when Jonathan glanced at me with the same eyes as Jevn, I thought he somehow had the same legitimate complaints, too; the same well-founded suspicions, the same hurt, and the same unwillingness to let me get close. Sometimes I felt I was turning my back on both of them at once.
As I climbed the stairs to my apartment, I resolved never to reach out again. I’d take only what he would give me; I’d hold him only when he was handed to me.
* * *
One night, Sleepy Amy invited me out to play pool. She was insistent that I should get out of my apartment occasionally and do things. And that night I saw a boy. I didn’t know I could do that anymore—see boys as anything but long labors and distant mothers’ sons.
He was wearing dirty white overalls and plucking an upright bass underneath a spotlight on a small stage. Curly red hair slicked back with pomade. I saw him that night, and then I found out where he would be playing another night, and another. I made myself available but I didn’t make any first moves. Finally we got squished together in the threshold of a door when he was between sets, and we met. I said I liked his music; it reminded me of home. It turned out he was from Tennessee, too. At the end of the show, he came over and asked how I was doing.
“I’m just,” I stammered. I already liked him. “I don’t know, I’m just—” I didn’t know where to start. My infinite guilt, my lost son. He didn’t know anything about me.
He smiled. “Let’s go outside, and you can tell me how just you are.”
I found out he had hitchhiked, homeless, through the South and up through West Virginia to the Ohio River Valley, following spirits, avoiding full moons, collecting songs and stories of early radio history along the way. Oversized and ghostly on the tiny stage, he sang sad songs; his voice was deep and low, uncertain and crackling. When he wasn’t playing in bars, he would busk on the sidewalk. I realized it was him I’d heard howling on the street corner from the window of my new apartment near the university. Songs from the South that treated grief and joy with the same unsmiling reserve.
I had always tried to distance myself from that music, playing Beethoven and Liszt to escape Tennessee. But lately I was drawn to it. And Graham was an archivist of this old music; he had a tune for every tragedy.
* * *
One day we went walking around the pond where I had labored. There were ducks perched, teetering, just on the edge.
“We should kick them in,” I said, I’m not sure why. I wanted something simple like meanness to solve everything.
“But they just got dried off!” Graham laughed.
“But they’re ducks; they don’t mind the water.” I didn’t really want to kick them in. We kept walking, silent.
“Or you could kick them in the air, and I could shoot them,” he said sweetly.
I decided to tell him about my summer. He already knew it somehow, but he wouldn’t take his eyes away for a second. After a long pause, he smiled a little, nodded his head twice, and put his hand on mine, like he was my grandfather. The particular contours of my experience were new to him, but the weight and the complexity were familiar, and he bore it like he bore the full burden of his own sadness, without the faintest hope he could make it better.
“Trials and temptations…,” he said to himself, like he was adding my story to his collection of sad songs. The world was a solid stack of them, trials and temptations.
Now that it was months since the adoption, people I knew were mostly reminding me that it was my decision, and what they meant was that I was disqualified from being sad about it. Graham was the only person who seemed to understand that the hardest thing about it was that it had been my decision. He had so many songs about tragedy brought on by the one who suffers it. That’s precisely what true tragedy was, I remembered from Shakespeare in sophomore English. Having to live with yourself, bound for eternity to the person who hurt you most.
* * *
Back at school, I was always getting the opposite of sympathy and understanding from Jevn. One night I left a note for him. He’d finished a stage of his thesis, and I wanted to acknowledge it. Congratulations, it said. I left it in his studio.
“You know it’s a crime to steal,” he informed me as we passed in the hallway the next morning. His Wilco CD had disappeared from his desk in the night, around the time I’d left my note, and though he didn’t really think I was responsible, he was letting me know he had received my note, and that I hadn’t made any kind of progress with it.
I told myself Graham was better for me. He trusted me and gave space to my sadness. He also made working so hard in studio all the time seem silly. He was part of a far more honest school. Sitting in the tiny booth where he worked as a parking attendant, he read what he was compelled to read, and he’d become impassioned about Greek coins, or Hindu gods, unti
l he read about the Civil War and became impassioned about that. He’d leap up to chase cars that left without paying, his temper as hot as his fiery red hair, and then he’d sit back down and read science books from a hundred years ago and get evangelical about obsolete theories of medicine or physics. There was so much I didn’t know about him, but I knew, lying on the grass observing the clouds, that I could count on him to be just as moved as I was. To not shut up about the glow of sunset around the rims.
My studio that quarter was about solid walls, made not of studs and surfaces but of weight, brick upon brick, that collects real warmth from the sun, holds it, and releases it slowly in the darkness. I was working one afternoon at my studio desk, designing a bathroom. I remembered a sink I’d seen in Sweden at a building I paid close attention to because Jevn had told me about it many months before, before I’d even planned my trip to Europe. The spout was just the end of a pipe that emerged directly from the masonry wall, and the basin was a trough that drained to an open hole in the floor. You could easily follow the movement of the water through the walls and cavities, like the masonry was just a screen that exposed and concealed the watery nature of the world.
I felt someone standing by my desk. I took off my headphones and said hello to Megan, a girl from my program who was a year ahead of me. I wasn’t sure what had happened to her. She’d begun school as a curly-haired, fun-loving kind of Goth, but she had shaved her head and now she seemed genuinely dark and pensive.
“Heyyy!” she stumbled, ultracasual. She lengthened words and ran them together. “How’s it going? I was wondering, would you want to go outside for a break in a little while?”
I was always finding reasons why I should take a break in a little while. Especially when it was nearing sunset, as our school had its beautiful northwest prospect, though no windows in that direction. We pushed through my favorite doors, which were weighted to resist us with three pounds of pressure, I’d recently learned. The same amount of pressure it would take to rip someone’s ear off. Everything in architecture was scaled to some multiple of human proportions.
We walked around to the grass and sat against the building. It felt like summer. A year ago I had just met Paula and Erik.
“How’s your baby? Have you seen him?” Megan asked me. This was why I liked her. She didn’t just ask about studio. I don’t even think she cared about studio.
“Yeah, actually, look—!” I pulled out of my bag a photo that I’d just gotten from Paula. He was standing up, wearing a blue checkered business suit with shorts.
“Paula said she’s dressing him badly on purpose, to keep him from getting a big head.” I held the photo so that we could both see, but then Megan stayed looking at it for a long time, smiling. Then she wiped her face hard with the edge of her hand.
“You know, I was pregnant, too.” She breathed deeply to keep from crying. I was surprised. I was so preoccupied with my own aloneness, it hadn’t occurred to me other people were alone, too.
“I couldn’t do what you did. I kept watching you. When you got bigger, I thought, the same thing should be happening to me. And—when you talk about your son, I think about what my child would be like now.” I felt like I remembered now, how curious she had been about me, all the questions she had asked that other people didn’t. “You’re so lucky you have this.” She took the photograph from my hands and studied it. “That you can know how big he is.”
I didn’t know what to say. I told her I didn’t feel lucky.
* * *
I talked to Jevn a few times during his final quarter. We would e-mail each other to arrange our meetings because the chance encounters, though they happened all the time, were too startling. They put us immediately in our defensive positions, which by the end of the term had dulled and deepened. But we would always find ourselves there, anyway. Angry and hurt and determined not to talk again for a while.
Then one night Jevn came into my studio and asked me to come talk in the woodshop, where he was working that evening. I followed him there, his broad shoulders swinging, angling back occasionally, awkwardly, to make small talk as we walked down the stairs. We wove through the saws into the small booth with the special equipment that had to be signed out: the small tools, the drill bits, X-Acto knives, and goggles. He pulled a metal stool in my direction. Tiny gestures like that meant so much to me. A Plexiglas window shielded us from the table saws and drill presses and planers and intake fans, all operating at full volume.
I was not sure what prompted this talk, but I knew that Jevn had something to say. Every word would be carefully chosen. I was nervous and excited. Maybe that explains why I don’t remember most of it.
I do remember we were interrupted. Jevn’s job was to remind people to keep blade guards in place. Not to use that drill on metal. Wear protective goggles at all times. He sometimes had to tell people when to miter, when to saw, which saw, in what sequence. When he opened the door and stepped out of our little room, I breathed. I remember feeling it was one of those fragile, precious moments, when I would have a rare, real glimpse of him. Like the first time he told me about his father. I would not gawk, or push it, or respond. It was delicate, and I was bound to break it. He returned. His arm rested long on the tabletop beside him, and his hand reached for a drill key, spinning it forward and back.
He said he was adjusting to Jonathan’s position in his life every day. “There are moments when I wish I was his dad, but the situation didn’t allow for that at all, and I’m very aware of that.”
Maybe this was a kind of apology? A recognition of what I’d been through, too? Did wishing he was our son’s dad mean he regretted it? Or was he advising me to push away regret, the way he was doing, by reminding myself the situation didn’t allow for it. Was I the situation? Could I have changed the situation? These were questions not to ask. I didn’t ask them. Each word, carefully chosen, was only itself.
“They were taking his vital signs and weighing him on that cart,” he said as he leaned forward and looked down at the key, “and he grabbed my finger for the first time. It was such a delicate—intense thing.” He leaned back and scanned the workshop. “All this energy gets converted into changing me, how I think and how I act. It affects how I am with everybody. I think I’m lucky in that respect. There isn’t an end. That’s a powerful myth. Beginnings are just as powerful.” He paused and glanced at me. “So where to begin after tragedy, here and now?”
I was afraid to say anything. I was just grateful for the moment. I was bound to ruin it by making it about us, by telling him I loved him, or something else he wouldn’t believe. I told him I thought I should go. He hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
I walked away feeling heartened and full, but I only felt sure about one thing. He was actually there, the whole time.
* * *
My Phenomenology of Film professor told us he’d misspent his youth as a pool shark in Knoxville, Tennessee, and one day I brought Graham to class to meet him, knowing they would click. Then Graham started coming all the time, though he’d never been enrolled in college, to watch beautiful films in the afternoons and to discuss their phenomenology.
One day after class, Graham and I ran into Jevn in the hallway. I froze for a moment. It was just a few days after we’d spoken in the woodshop. I wanted to give that conversation space and air. But at that moment it must have looked like it had meant nothing to me; I’d listened to him quietly and let him speak, but I hadn’t mentioned I was already over everything and busy with another relationship. Jevn passed, not looking at us, sliding along the wall.
* * *
After that, he buried himself in his thesis, and soon he had intricate models at three scales and a full set of drawings drafted by hand, at the time when everyone was just starting to forget how to do that. He was done ahead of time, and while everyone else scrambled to finish, his models were put on display in the school gallery.
We would pass each other in the halls, smiling awkwardly the way we a
lways had. You might have thought we had a secret crush on each other, that we were just getting started, but you’d have never guessed we were inextricably bound, like love and fear, in a faraway son.
Jevn was the only person I’d ever met whose work was so good, you could call it a gift. Not a gift like a talent, but a gift to the world. You could be moved by it, even if you didn’t know anything about architecture. At the end of the year, I passed by his final critique. Fifteen or twenty students were gathered, watching the professors review his work. From a distance, I saw him miming the slow swing of an imaginary golf club, or maybe a baseball bat, aimed for the outfield. Technically, he was having his final presentation to determine whether he would graduate, but everyone knew he had graduated a long, long time ago. As I came closer, I realized they were not critiquing. They were just taking it all in.
“How many teams of interns did you have helping you do all this? How many models do you have? Those two and then three, four…”
“And you did all of these drawings by hand?” One critic stood and put his face just inches from one of the drawings.
Finally, one of the professors said something about wanting to adopt Jevn as his own son. He was just trying to express how impressed he was, but I thought that was a very strange thing to say, given what had happened.
* * *
Paula and Erik brought the kids to Ohio for Jevn’s graduation, and if I had any doubt about how things would be, Jevn clarified it by e-mail a week before they arrived. It would not be like the honeymoon of our long-ago Cincinnati double dates. Jevn had tickets for Jonathan’s family, and he wanted a few of his favorite professors to meet them on Friday night. He wanted either dinner or brunch with them on Saturday, before or after the graduation. He said that I could spend time with them Sunday morning. He added that he was flexible on everything, but it was very clear that we would not spend any time with Jonathan together.
