by Lee Vance
It was lunchtime. We were playing a full-court pickup game in the main gym, five a side, wearing street clothes. I’d just scored on a fast break when I heard Coach call my name. I was surprised to see him walking toward me with Miss Jones, the school nurse, and discomfited by the expression on his face. Coach had only one look, a fierce, half-bored glare that suggested he’d be happy to kick your ass if you weren’t so pitiful. A scrub named Irwin did a brilliant imitation of Coach fucking his wife, sixty seconds of wild, deadpan hip thrusts, culminating in a single laconic grunt. When someone wasn’t playing aggressively enough, Coach announced contemptuously that the offender had run out of mean, and he sent him outside to take laps. Walking toward me that day, Coach looked like he’d run out of mean. My eyes slid to Miss Jones and I noticed she was wearing her heels on Coach’s high-gloss maple floor. I knew something bad had happened, but the words Coach mumbled were worse than anything I’d let myself imagine.
Miss Jones rode shotgun in Coach’s car while I sat in the back. She was a mousy brunette scarcely older looking than some of the seniors, with perfect breasts that strained against her tight white office coat, embarrassing more than one boy during team physicals. Undeterred by my refusal to make eye contact, she glanced over her shoulder frequently while carrying on a nervous monologue about Jesus and lambs and God’s mysterious plan, seemingly unable to shut up. Coach’s glance caught mine in the rearview mirror, and I saw the corner of his mouth turn up for a second before he remembered himself. The smile made me feel better, and lessened the shame glazing my grief.
One look at the spare hospital chapel was all it took for Coach to bail, Miss Jones assuring him she could take the bus back to school. He gave me a bone-crunching handshake and whispered, “Winners never quit,” as if he were afraid that God or Miss Jones would hear him. Declining her repeated suggestion that we pray together, I spent the next forty minutes watching her shift uncomfortably on a thinly padded kneeler, her suffering doubtless a sacrifice to the Lord and a lesson to me. I wondered when my father would arrive, and whether it would be appropriate to tell him about Miss Jones’s aching knees on the car ride home. Stories about vanity or pretension always made him laugh. I heard a door open behind me.
“Peter.”
I rose and walked toward my father, studying his manner for cues. Cheeks pinked with emotion, Miss Jones fluttered past me, one hand smoothing her crushed dress.
“Mr. Tyler,” she said. “I’m Miss Jones, the school nurse. I just want to tell you how terribly sorry I am for your loss.”
“Thank you,” my father said.
“I lost my mother six months ago, and I know it’s not the same thing, losing a parent and losing a spouse, but losing any loved one is a terrible trial. I know just how you feel, I really do, and the only thing that helped me get through it was prayer. I tried to persuade your son to pray with me, but he wasn’t ready yet. We have a prayer circle at St. Michael and All Angels every Monday night for anyone who wants to attend. Evenings can be terribly difficult when you’re grieving. You’d both be welcome to join us tonight.”
“You know how I feel?” my father asked politely.
“I do. The terrible thing about losing a loved one is that it makes you doubt God’s goodness just when you most need His love. Praying with other people helps, it really does, because it reminds you that you’re not alone, and that whatever suffering we experience in this life is only a small measure of the suffering God’s son undertook for our salvation, and that we’ll all be reunited forever in God’s kingdom in the next world, and comforted by His love eternally.”
“You know how I feel?” my father asked again, inflecting the pronouns just enough to make the emphasis audible.
“Do you belong to a church?” Miss Jones asked, pinking some more.
He opened the door for her and held it, inclining his head toward the hall courteously.
“You’ve been very kind,” he said. “Thank you for everything.”
Miss Jones rushed out, her cheeks blazing.
“We’ll give her a few minutes,” my father said after he’d closed the door. “Riding an elevator together would be uncomfortable.”
He didn’t say much until we’d pulled into our garage at home. Turning off the car, he closed the overhead door with the remote, not making any move to get out. His car was his office, a Chevy Caprice with a police package that he captained on weekly thousand-mile loops through a territory bounded roughly by Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Union-town, and West Seneca, selling specialty machine tools. He liked to do business in his car.
“Take notes,” he said.
I took a pencil and pad from the plastic caddy between the front seats and opened to a blank page.
“Short-term: No school tomorrow or Wednesday. There’ll be visiting hours both nights at the funeral home. You’ll need a navy blazer, blue shirt, clean khakis, brown belt, and a pair of decent brown shoes. You need to buy any of that?”
“No.”
“I want to see everything before you go to bed, washed, ironed, or polished.”
“Okay.”
“First thing tomorrow, you go to Clark’s. You’re going to need a new navy suit, a white shirt, a dark tie, a black belt, and black shoes.”
“I’ve already got some of that.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re not going to your mother’s funeral in worn clothing. Ask for Mr. Sherman and tell him you need everything by Wednesday lunch. His wife should be able to get any alterations done. Thursday’s the funeral. After the funeral, some folks are going to want to come back to the house. I’ll take care of liquor and food. Your job will be to bus dishes and make sure we don’t run out of glasses or plates.”
“Fine.”
“Friday, you’re going back to school. Friday night, you’ve got your first varsity game. I plan to be there. This weekend, we’ll clean out the house and box everything we don’t need for the Salvation Army. I’ll go through your mother’s things. You’ve probably got a lot of kid stuff we should’ve gotten rid of years ago. After that, we’ll divvy up chores and discuss the medium term. Food shopping’s going to be a problem until you get your license, but we’ll figure it out. You know how to cook some, right?”
“Yes.”
“Of course,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “You know how to do all the things a boy’s mother usually does for him.”
The garage light went out automatically and I reached up to switch on the ceiling dome. He caught my hand and pushed it away gently.
“Let’s talk, Sherlock,” he said, resurrecting my childhood nickname. “They tell you what happened?”
“Only that there was an accident.”
“She hit a light pole at the intersection of Pearl and Miner. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt.”
“Was she drunk?”
“Yes,” my father said, not bothering to point out that she was drunk pretty much all the time. We sat silently for a minute, listening to the engine tick as it cooled.
“I know you’ve got more questions,” he said. “Now’s the time to get them out—you don’t want to be living your life with one eye to the past.”
“Why’d she drink so much?”
“That school nurse of yours, the one with the big rack.”
“Miss Jones.”
“Why’d I get pissed off at her?”
“She doesn’t know anything about you. It’s insulting for her to say she knows how you feel.”
“Exactly.”
My father pushed in the lighter and took a cigarette from a pack in the caddy, tapping it against the dash. The lighter popped and he lit up, taking a deep drag and blowing smoke out slowly.
“Half the time,” he said, “women think they know what you’re feeling. And the other half, they’re trying to figure it out. Every time you do or say something, they’ve got a little process running in their brains, trying to decide what you meant by it. And what they want, more than anything else, is to know what you’re thin
king and feeling all the time. But there’s a catch. They only want you to be thinking and feeling the things they want you to be thinking and feeling. And there’s no guy in the world who thinks and feels the way a woman wants him to except when he’s rutting. That’s just a fact. So either men lie to women or women end up feeling disappointed.”
He drew on the cigarette again and exhaled, a gray haze settling between us.
“No one can control their feelings, and it’s a waste of time feeling bad about them. A boy can love his mother and be embarrassed by her at the same time, maybe even wish she was dead sometimes. And if she did die, his grief would be mixed up with all kinds of bad feelings about himself for thinking ill of her. Happens all the time, and not just to boys.”
I turned my head so my father wouldn’t see my tears.
“Now listen,” my father said, “because this is important. Nobody ever knows how someone else really feels. We’re all alone in this world. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is behavior. Men understand that. You give a guy your word and you keep it, no matter what. Friendship means you can trust another guy to watch your back, regardless of how he feels that day. A couple of good friends will carry you a long way in life. But if you start worrying about how people feel all the time, sooner or later you’re going to end up driving around town with an open fifth of vodka in the front seat.”
“You think that’s why Mom drank?” I asked, unable to conceal my bitterness.
“I don’t know why she drank. That’s what I’ve been telling you. No one ever really knows why somebody else does something. The only thing I know is that she did.”
I opened the car door. My father caught me roughly by the shirt.
“Close that door,” he said. “Maybe you didn’t take my point before. When we get out of the car, we’re drawing a line. This is all going to be in the past. So unless you want to be pacing around your bedroom at four in the morning twenty years from today, I suggest you get everything off your chest right now.”
Shutting the door, I took a deep breath and let fly.
“She said she drank because you didn’t love her.”
“And?”
“And that you were cheating on her. That you had a girlfriend in Michigan and another one in Pennsylvania. She said you spent a lot more nights away from home than you had to because you didn’t want to be with us.”
“Cause and effect,” he said. “Always difficult to sort out. Was she miserable because I was cheating on her, or was I cheating on her because she was miserable? Maybe Miss Jones can get an answer from the Almighty.”
“You were cheating.”
“That’s true.”
“You said behavior mattered,” I shouted, anger overwhelming me, “that being a man meant doing the right thing. Were you doing the right thing?”
“Would the right thing have been for me to lie to your mother about how I felt? Or to spend more time fighting with her?”
“Is it right to cheat?” I demanded.
“Men are men,” he said, shaking his head. “And a man can’t let himself be held hostage to a woman’s disappointment.” He tapped the butt of his cigarette with his thumb, flicking ashes into the ashtray. “Maybe you wonder why I never moved out.”
I glared into my lap, unwilling to answer him.
“I stayed because of you.”
My father never declined an invitation to shoot hoops in the driveway when he was home. We launched cameras and mice on model rockets, and won the local soap box derby with a home-built car when I was twelve. He’d driven two hundred miles on a Wednesday afternoon three years back to see my team try for the Pop Warner title. And we’d spent untold hours together with the telescope.
“I hate you,” I said, tears spilling from my eyes again.
“I don’t doubt you feel some hate,” he said. “That’s normal. I thought I hated my dad when I was your age. As I got older, I judged him differently. He did the best he could by his own lights. And regardless of what your mother and I went through, I’ve tried to do the best I could for you by mine.”
He reached out and touched my shoulder. I was sobbing.
“Your mother couldn’t bear anything that wasn’t perfect,” he said, “and nothing is. Everyone’s got problems, and there isn’t a damn thing you can do about most of them. You’re only responsible for yourself. If you need to roll a rock up a hill a hundred times in a row to achieve some objective, then roll it up the hill. But don’t go rolling someone else’s rock up a hill if they keep letting it roll back down on top of you. You understand?”
I nodded. He gave me his handkerchief and I dried my eyes.
“Will you be home more now?” I asked.
“You’re fifteen years old,” he said. “You’ve outgrown the soap box derby. Next year, you’ll be driving. You’re not going to need me around as much as you might think.”
He touched a finger to the clock.
“It’s almost three. I’ve got to call the funeral home. Are we about done here?”
“I don’t want to get out of the car,” I said, a fresh sob constricting my throat.
“That’s how you feel. Maybe I feel the same way. But we’re going to get out of the car and we’re going to get squared away and we’re going to do the right things. I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine. It can be that simple between us.”
He extended his hand and I took it.
“Friends,” he said. “Now open the door.”
16
THE CONCIERGE GRIMACES as he reads the address printed on the foil condom packet I’ve placed on his honed granite counter. He clicks his ceramic ballpoint rapidly eight or ten times, marks the Russian-language map I bought in the gift shop with a dismissive flourish, and then flicks the condom away with a buffed nail. It slides off the counter, falling to the floor.
“Sorry,” he says snidely.
I paced for hours last night, collapsing into a fitful sleep only after the sun rose. Dreams of my boyhood were peopled by odd characters—Rommy at the wheel of my father’s car, Pongo running a varsity basketball practice, Andrei as the brother I never had, sitting next to me silently at the dinner table while our mother drank and wept. Waking exhausted shortly before noon, I dressed hurriedly, needing to escape the room.
I smile politely at the concierge and put a ten-ruble bill, worth about thirty American cents, on the counter in front of him.
“You’ve been very helpful,” I say.
I wait until he picks the bill up, and then continue staring at him until he says a sullen thank-you. I may feel beat, but I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to act it.
The clinic is near the Lubyanka, in the basement of a massive limestone building whose Beaux-Arts façade and tattered vinyl shades suggest government offices. I walk down a flight of stairs, pull open a heavy metal door, and step into a wide stone corridor. Battered pilasters support a vaulted ceiling, capitals adorned with paint-crusted imperial eagles, twin heads facing in opposite directions. It’s cold enough to see my breath.
A large man wearing a black knit ski cap and an American army jacket is seated at a folding table, a line of people waiting patiently for his attention. He scrawls something on a piece of paper, hands it to the young woman at the head of the line, and points to his right. The woman shuffles away, a toddler sleeping on her hip. I join the line and wait my turn.
Ten minutes later, he addresses me in Russian.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I only speak English.”
“You are here to see who?” he asks with a thick accent.
“Dr. Anderson.”
“You have an appointment?”
“No.”
“She will not see you. You must phone first.” Motioning toward the door dismissively, he turns his body a fraction to signal that he’s now addressing the person behind me.
“I think she’ll want to see me.”
The muscles in his neck bulge as he cocks his head, looking back to me. He has a prizefighter�
�s nose, flattened and skewed, with a jagged vertical scar on the oblique side, where his face was inexpertly sewn together. He must be the receptionist and the bouncer.
“She will not. You must phone first.”
“I’m only in Moscow today. A friend of mine asked me to call on her. Andrei Zhilina. I’m here to make a contribution. To give money.”
He gazes at me unblinking and then bends forward slightly, scrutinizing me from the floor up. I’m wearing Timberlands, jeans, and a Burberry all-weather coat. Hopefully, my clothing’s more presentable than my face.
“You have a business card?”
I dig one of my old cards from Klein out of my wallet and hand it to him. He examines it carefully and then dials a cell phone, conducting a quick, mumbled conversation in Russian. I hear him speak both my name and Andrei’s.
“Come,” he says, standing up.
He snaps his fingers at a man I hadn’t noticed, who’s leaning against the wall behind me. The second man walks over and sits at the reception table. The bouncer escorts me down the corridor, past a crowded waiting area, and into a small examination room.
“Lift arms, please.”
“Why?”
“You want to see Dr. Anderson, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Lift arms.”
I raise my arms and he pats me down carefully, fingers lingering on the CD I made at Andrei’s apartment and the book I took from the nightstand. His breath smells like yesterday’s fish dinner.
“You have a lot of trouble here?” I ask, puzzled by all the security.
“Wait,” he says, ignoring my question. “Dr. Anderson will come.”
He exits, leaving me alone. The examination room contains a wooden table, a locked metal supply cabinet, and a rolling stool with a white vinyl top. A brightly colored Russian-language poster hangs on one wall, somber Sesame Street–like characters displaying genital rashes. I sit down on the stool and close my eyes, struggling with a sense of unreality. Three months ago, Jenna was alive, and Tigger and I were shooting hoops in my office. How the hell did I ever end up here?
