God and Jetfire
Page 32
He moved his chair six inches back and sat down. He tilted his head and scanned the length.
“Looking at it,” he whispered, “where does it look like there’s potential for failures?”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“It’s going to be easy to figure it out after it doesn’t work. What’s hard is to figure it out before it doesn’t work.” He began to position himself to fire it. My brother and I were pensive, but we didn’t know what success would look like any more than failure.
“Where’s the safest place to be?” I asked.
“I think probably behind it,” he said with a scientist’s reserve.
“Am I behind it?” my mom asked, suddenly scrambling with no direction. “We ought to warn our neighbors.”
“Less exciting if we warned them,” Dad said. “Is everybody ready?” He tugged the string that pulled the trigger. The whole device hopped and nothing happened. Except that it became a little more clear what he meant it to do.
“Okay. Back to Plan A. I’ve got to adjust my trigger mechanism.”
“The neighbors just pulled up,” Mom said, as if putting a hole in their roof would be more conscionable if they weren’t home. And without warning my dad shot the device at low tension from half-cocked. The lead weight flew up in the air and swung back, almost knocking him in the head; he was slow on his feet from the chemo. But he declared that test a success, inasmuch as it was a definite failure.
* * *
When I woke up in the morning, I reveled in the sound of my mother clinking dishes in the kitchen and my father’s thought-laden steps, now slower and lighter as he made his way to the bathroom and then down the stairs. The exact dimension of the space, the particular echo of the hallway, everything was perfectly positioned to deliver those sounds to my bedroom to comfort me with the world’s unchangingness. I used to lose myself in the textured ceiling, trying to comprehend eternity, and sometimes I would try to comprehend my parents’ deaths. It was like touching my finger to the sharp edge of a blade to feel the sticky scrape of the narrow edge. It was a kind of thrill to imagine the horrifying unimaginable only to remember that it wasn’t real. But it was also important to chip away at it, because someday it would be.
I lay in my bed and thought, There will really not be many more mornings like this. But this news was not news. I’d always known my dad would die. I cried, but wildly. I cried for common knowledge. I cried for reality. I cried at confirmation that everything is invisibly slipping out of your grasp; the world had elbows that were sharp inside you and growing, without cushions, as you prepared for the inescapable moment when you would have to let it go.
THIRTY-FOUR
My heart leapt, seeing Jevn’s name on my screen, that singular sequence of letters, the special shape of the spaces between them. No part of me could dismiss it or put things in some removed perspective, or stop thinking so highly of him. An e-mail from Jevn meant something, it always had. And the whole world disappeared.
He reminded me of our entire story. His momentary happiness when he found out I was pregnant and then my certain and shattering rejection.
I’d forgotten how articulate he was and how generously he loved me. Everything I hadn’t forgotten, I didn’t know in the first place. I didn’t know when I met him how hard it was to find someone good, and honest, and true. I didn’t know how few men I’d want to make a father, how very few men I’d want to love in a son.
He said that he couldn’t imagine me without my dreams, and for that reason he was glad I’d corrected his delusions and broken up with him. But, he said, I have never felt so much for anybody, learned so much, misunderstood so much, or apologized so much. Despite everything, he wanted to do it, wait at the bus stop every day, read every bedtime story—my heart was racing and my hand was shaking, scribbling the word in the beating of my blood before I could find a way to communicate a trembling but certain Yes. It was simple! There would be nothing to mourn for!
I looked around to the seats ahead of me, behind, to remember where I was. On the train, almost halfway to New Haven. I flinched as I returned to the present. And back to my computer screen, Jevn’s e-mail dated December a decade ago. I’d found it looking for something else. I couldn’t remember having ever read it. The trees catapulting across my field of view made me forget for a second that I couldn’t fly. But I was ten years down the road I’d dared to close my eyes and fall asleep imagining. Pressing reply wouldn’t change anything.
Regret was always doing that. Turning things inside out, making it feel as though time were just a rubbery toy, and I could bend this part to touch that part, and reconnect the pieces in an entirely nonsensical sequence. Regret was always giving the most inaccessible possibilities life and bringing them so near I did not have to reach, or roll, to find the warmth of his tiny breath. I felt I could press reply, and these ten years without my son would be a loop I closed again.
My father’s declining condition made it worse. It made impossible things urgent and imperative. Most of all, I had to have children to remember him. But I had done the math a million times. Two years to find a husband, a year to get married, another year to have a baby, eight years until my child would really have memories of my father, two more until he really got how funny my father was, maybe two more till he saw the sweetness. That was sixteen years. How had we not anticipated this? My parents married late and encouraged me to marry late. We had built a super-efficient structure entirely lacking in redundancy. Generation lapped generation by the smallest possible measures of time. And now there was no time left.
I twisted time frantically in my too-long fingers. I would undo his cancer. I would take away his mouthwash, or his cigars, or his antacids or whatever made him have that cancer. I would make him go to the doctor sooner. I would undo his surgery so he could still speak. I would undo my age. We would have a hundred turnip parties, a million peanuts, all the togetherness he wanted. I would find a husband tomorrow. I would have three kids fifteen years ago. They would rub his feet as he died. But that wouldn’t happen for thirty more years. I would do everything I had to. I had to do something. And then I realized the impossible thing I really had to do, though I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t know how to do it, and it was scarier than all the other impossible things, but scary as it was, it seemed somehow less impossible: I had to get my son back.
* * *
I arrived in New Haven late at night. I had arranged to stay with Charles, a man I’d been dating for a few months who happened to live there, too, and who could not, if his life depended on it, build anything. He’d told me he could see how much I wanted my son, desired him in an unreasonable and impractical way. A way that could never be satisfied, but had a life of its own. And he said that, on that same primal, fundamental, never-to-be-concretized level, he very much did not want him. Seeing a photograph of Jonathan, he remembered meeting Jevn by chance in Rome. He told me that no man can fully embrace the child of another man; the child is an intrusion on his territory.
I appreciated his forthrightness. His ability to speak rationally about irrational impulses meant he had sympathy for my own. And it had no bearing on his support for my relationship with my son. He said he did want my son for my sake; he wanted me to have what I wanted. He wanted me to get him back, whatever that meant. He sent me off in the morning with an espresso and an egg.
On the commuter train, I wrote an e-mail to Jevn, asking how he was doing, and he wrote a short reply, saying nice to hear from me and that he was doing fine. He had no idea what I’d been about to write him yesterday. I arrived early. I had time for two minutes in the bathroom at the station. A minute to buy another espresso, just for comfort, at the café. I tried to take my time, take control, like I’d been taught at the piano bench. When you step out onstage, don’t rush to start playing. Walk slowly to the bench. Sit, test the height. Roll the seat down, sit and test. This time is yours. Adjust yourself. Breathe.
* * *
“Hello!” I said to Paula as I jumped in.
She reached over to hug me. I had the impulse to say, “Happy Mother’s Day!” but my imagination cycled through potential worst-case scenarios. Our motherhoods were like one of those optical illusions where you are going up stairs and down stairs—but it’s impossible for your brain to comprehend both at once. Would this day be hers or mine? It wasn’t for me to decide.
“It is so beautiful today!” I said, instead.
“It is!”
I should have brought flowers. But flowers would seem too much a gesture of gratitude, when I thought we both had reason to be grateful on this day. If either of us had money to spend on flowers, we would have put it into the kids’ college savings.
* * *
When we arrived at the house, Jonathan, Andrew, and I went straight to the backyard so they could show me their parkour. They’d started learning it the previous fall when Jonathan was getting too big for the swing set and had started climbing on it in a way it wasn’t built for, and so I’d said it reminded me of parkour, and then I’d shown him some videos on YouTube. “Amy, is this parkour?” he’d ask, leaping off the monkey bars. “Is this parkour? Is this parkour?” Andrew would run and jump over the end of the slide and then fall and roll across the yard. It was all parkour, as far as I could tell. Parkour is urban gymnastics; it is running the skyline of the city, it’s enjoying full ownership of your lungs and limbs, it’s jumping off roofs, balancing on handrails, leaping down stairways, making stunt props of every obstacle. Paula signed Jonathan up for gymnastics so that he could enjoy all those dangerous things more effectively. And now, seeing him walk on his hands or attempt a forward flip, knowing he’d been practicing since I last said goodbye, I felt proud. I was seeing the imprint of something I’d said on a whole chapter of his life. Then I quit thinking that. It would probably make him look at me with suspicion.
* * *
I went inside to say hello to Sarah and Erik. Sarah was cradling a rabbit, one of the many small creatures she kept in her attic bedroom, its sloped ceilings painted like the sky. I gave her a hug and spotted Jonathan slipping in through the sliding glass door. As soon as I unwrapped Sarah, he grabbed hold of me.
“I didn’t hug you yet,” he explained.
I squeezed him hard, as if I was compensating for my negligence, but really it was less hard than I wanted to squeeze him, all the time. I was glad he made it happen; I’d been trying to figure out how to negotiate a hug after the car ride home, without it being awkward, without everyone wondering why I was suddenly laying a hug on him, and—there it was. I got it.
I hugged Andrew happily after that, picking him up.
“How much do you weigh?” I asked him. I’d started to love him somewhere along the way. He was easy to love. It made me think about how difficult it must have been to give him up.
“Fifty pounds,” Andrew answered earnestly, as if it was a natural question for one person to ask another.
“Only fifty pounds?! You feel much heavier.” How much, how much weight was hidden in those fifty pounds.
Erik got breakfast ready while Paula set the table and put the bagels on a plate. I gravitated toward my son, waiting for me in the dining room. He sat down and told me which seat was mine: the head of the table. He said it with such confidence, I thought maybe it had been decided by everyone earlier, and I sat. Maybe the mothers were taking each of the heads of the table. But no, Erik took his seat at the other head. Paula sat down along the side. I, the fertile concubine. Her in the trenches, with the actual children, with the dirty job of being a mother. Or maybe all of that was the opposite. I was the dirty producer, and she was the acting mother, the one with dignity. She should be here in my place, for sure. Aiy. I hoped everyone understood Jon told me to sit here, and I was only sitting here because he had.
Erik had made a massive breakfast. Usually meals were very small when I visited, and since Paula was usually in charge of cooking, I wondered if she simply lost her appetite when I was around. But not today; Erik made me a mimosa to start, and the table was laid out with eggs and spinach, fruit salad with strawberries and cantaloupe, croissants, fried potatoes, and bagels.
“Wow, Erik! This is extravagant,” Paula said as she sat down. “I guess I’ll be going grocery shopping again this week.”
These were the kinds of paradoxes of being a mother-mother on Mother’s Day—even with breakfast made for you, you still don’t get a break. Erik poured my coffee. I decided not to eat too much and not to ask for a refill on my mimosa. Jonathan wasn’t eating the very small scoop of scrambled eggs I’d given him.
“Jonathan had doughnuts at church. He doesn’t have room for eggs!” Erik winked at Jon. Erik was always eating leftover food off the kids’ plates, like father-fathers were supposed to do.
Usually I wouldn’t say anything, no matter how hard it was to see my son not eat. But my father was sick, and Jonathan was my only son, and I had to somehow get him back.
“Even if you get full eating bad-for-you stuff, you still have to eat good-for-you stuff so you can get enough nutrients,” I said, boldly.
Jonathan thought about it and picked at his eggs.
“If you’re going to get any good at parkour, you need protein, and iron, and B-twelve, and all kinds of nutrients you can’t get from doughnuts and Lemonheads and those kinds of things.” I was parenting from the head of the table, right in front of everyone!
He took maybe one more bite.
“That’s really good reasoning from Amy, Jon,” Paula said. I wondered if she thought I was trying to do her job, or trying to suggest she was negligent in the role I gave her, and whether she wished I wouldn’t or whether she welcomed it as someone who welcomes any person taking an interest in the good of her children, or welcomed it exactly because I am her son’s birth mother, having a relationship she has always wanted me to have with my son. I was probably not paying enough attention to the other kids and whether they were eating their eggs.
“Jon, have you told Amy about your interest in philosophy?” Paula asked. “I’m going to a conference next month and the kids will be going with me. Maybe Jonathan will present a paper at the conference?” she suggested coyly. Jonathan smiled broadly and began to think.
“You’ll have to get started on your research!” I tried to participate. It was fun to imagine my son as someone who would one day do research.
“I think I’ll gather some props,” he said, eyes darting around the room, planning the talk he might give. “Like Black Forest Gummy Worms! And what’s a big word I should use? Controversy!”
He distinguished philosophy as a world wide open; he made a broad, sweeping gesture like a swan dive into the everything. He said he knew that the questions of philosophy were ultimately unanswerable. But, ask them or not, they’ll haunt you the rest of your life. I savored for a second his inclination toward uncertainty. Yes, he was very much theirs, the child of academics, but he was also very much mine.
Theology, on the other hand, was built from argument upon argument. He crouched and squinted his eyes at the tiny bricks he was laying in the air, argument upon argument, building a wall with surgical precision, using index finger and thumb of each hand. He used the word argument derogatorily: he meant those boring conversations that took place between his theologian parents and their theologian friends in the living room, in the side yard; his world was full of theologians having arguments.
“You’re very good at arguing, though, Jonathan,” Paula challenged him. “Remember a few nights ago, when I said it was time to go to bed, and you said, ‘Can I have just five more minutes?’ Wasn’t that an argument?”
“I was asking a ques-tion.” Jonathan slowly enunciated the word. Ques
tions were the hallmark of philosophy.
“Questions are a basic component of arguments—”
“See?” Jonathan exhaled, exasperated. “You’re arguing with me right now!”
* * *
Paula asked how my father was doing, and I told her all I knew. He had not been totally debilitated by chemotherapy, and the cancer hadn’t metastasized, despite its advanced state when the doctors had discovered it. His years of eating well and staying active had paid off, but I had no sense of his prognosis. I told her I’d really like it if they could visit him that summer. I said it casually, as if my father wasn’t dying, my son not my only hope. Surely they would understand the importance.
“Well, the one big thing we have planned is Andrew’s birth mother’s wedding. Andrew is going to be the ring bearer!”
“Oh, wow!” I wasn’t about to try to take something away from my son’s brother’s birth mother.
“The wedding is in July. We were only planning for me and Andrew to go, but let me think about how we might all do both.”
Then Erik asked about my injury, and I told him I still wasn’t running. It was a constant preoccupation, but I didn’t linger on the details, maybe because they didn’t elaborate the details of their own lives, either; we caught up in broad strokes. Or maybe because my life was just the story of a prolonged adolescence, an endless series of phases, lacking any of the milestones that warrant conversation: getting married, buying property, having children. My son’s adoption had established their family, hearty and real, but it made me altogether weightless.
They never passed me the potatoes. They sat eternally to the left of Erik’s plate. I wondered if that was to deprive me of them so that I would starve to death and then Jonathan would become more fully theirs. Or maybe they thought I’d ask for them if I wanted them. But I took only what I was offered. I’d already expressed my desire for Jonathan to see my father and to eat his eggs, and those efforts had exhausted me. It was enough of what I wanted for a day.