The Beloved Son

by Jay Quinn

  “Good for her,” Melanie said. “I’d have slapped the shit out of him.”

  Caroline laughed from the backseat. “She was fuming when I went back to her while she was changing. She was quite appropriately pissed.”

  “Oh, she’s still in charge,” Karl said. “You noticed how she maneuvered us all into going to mass tomorrow morning, at eight o’clock, no less.”

  “C’mon, Karl,” Caroline urged from the backseat. “Going to church isn’t going to kill you. Why were you so reluctant to say yes? I thought I was going to have to stomp on your foot to get you to answer her.”

  Karl sighed. He knew his reluctance was indefensible, but he said, “I just resent being manipulated into it. Mom and Dad made me go the whole route, altar boy and everything. I did enough of it when I was a kid to last me a lifetime. The idea of it just gets my hackles up. I’m not that person anymore, and I resent them for not acknowledging that.”

  “You’re putting too much into it, Dad,” Melanie said as she joined the eddies and swells of traffic on I-95. “It’s not about you. Offer it up.”

  Karl snickered at her use of that old phrase. When anything annoyed him, or when he had to do something he didn’t want to when he was a child, his mother would always chide him and tell him to offer it up as a sacrifice to the Lord Jesus. He had been unaware that he had passed that particular idea and phrase to his daughter. “Okay. Well said, Mel. I’ll offer it up.”

  After that, they fell silent, lulled by the speed and motion of the car as it headed north. Karl became lost in the view of southern Florida from I-95. Where nothing had been when he’d arrived forty years ago, this sixteen-lane river of traffic wound now. To the east and west, the landscape was filled with the lights of human habitation. They sparkled, those million streetlights and lit windows, shining on lives and families probably not too different from his own.

  As they sped through the early darkness, Karl felt the megalopolis surge all around him. He marveled at the engineering of the road under the wheels. It was his job to design these roadways that spanned long distances and connected with the larger web of roads. With a professional eye, he could imagine the blueprints and bids it must have taken for every overpass and gently banked curve. The brute elegance of it entranced him, and he was happy to let his thoughts slide away to something that had sure meaning and calculated purpose.

  The world of emotion he’d been living in for the past few days was too unstable under his feet. His father’s moods, his mother’s fugues, his brother’s changes—none of it was designed. It was all uncontrolled cause and effect, and he wasn’t grounded in that sort of reality. He liked concrete solutions, and the authentically messy lives of his family had fatigued him in ways he was unaccustomed to. His spirit was as sore as an unused muscle suddenly called upon to torque and twist to a new task. Karl felt the soreness as sure as the sense of speed that was rushing this trip to its end.

  “Well, you two,” he said, breaking the silence, “I’m not sorry we came. But I have to tell you, I’m glad we’re going home tomorrow.”

  “You know,” Melanie said contemplatively, “I heard this tale of an African chieftain who grew tired of everyone in his village complaining to him about their problems. So he had everyone put their problems in a bag and leave them in one big pile of bags. Then he made them, one by one, go to the pile and pick a bag. Everyone in the village prayed they’d get their own bag back. That’s kind of the way I feel,” she concluded.

  “But these problems belong to all of us,” Caroline insisted. “This is our family. I do feel lucky to be able to fly out here to visit and then go back home so easily, but I feel badly that I can’t leave having made anything better.”

  Karl thought about what each of them had said as he continued to watch the city slide past his window. As he turned back to look out the tracery of taillights ahead of them, an essential truth struck him as like one of his frequent flashes of inspiration did. He thought it over in his mind, exploring the texture and edges of what he wanted to say. When he had it firmly in his grasp, he said quietly, “I don’t think we came to make anything better here. These aren’t problems that Mom and Dad and Sven and Rob are facing, it’s just life. Some problems don’t have solutions. I think they just needed us to participate a little bit in what they’re going through.”

  Caroline reached up from the backseat and put her hand on his shoulder. “I think that’s the most emotionally astute thing you’ve come up with in a long time. Good job, baby. I couldn’t agree with you more.”

  Melanie laughed. “Who says you’re bad with feelings, Dad? Though sometimes I think you’re borderline Asperger’s syndrome, you can be pretty perceptive about emotions when you try.”

  Karl grinned despite himself and felt warmed by their comments. Though his feelings had been tested and still were sore, he didn’t feel like there were any more hurdles his parents and his brother could put in his path that he couldn’t clear. He was pretty good at designing bridges, and he was getting better at the ones not made of concrete and steel. Still, he had to admit, he preferred the ones that were built with things he could put his hands on.

  SUNDAY

  16

  WHEN THE FIRST tentative knock came at the bedroom door, Karl was at the bridge in his dream. The dream came often enough that he recognized it each time he found himself there. He’d had versions of this dream for as long as he could remember. Unlike most of his dreams, which were like watching a movie where he could see himself in the dreamscape, he viewed and felt this dream with himself as the camera’s lens. His eyes took in the scene, but he was absent from it. In fact, no one populated this dream.

  He resisted the second knock on the bedroom door, so reluctant was he to leave the dream. His body felt every sensation of the place. His penis was erect and he was aware of having a powerfulness and tautness to his body that he no longer really possessed. The sun shone, but the view was muted in tonality, as if the light were permeating a damp, warm wind that caressed his skin. He was aware that he stood on a beach, seeing things from just behind a lifeguard’s towering chair with a long, low bridge running off to a vanishing point on the water.

  Karl was aware of the scene and its every detail. He loved the angular simplicity of the setting. The view was a composition of straight lines, as if it had been created with draftsman’s tools. Everything was uniquely defined by certain linearity, like a child’s drawing of the beach, the sea, and the unending sky overhead. It appealed to Karl’s craving for orderliness and predictability.

  What was even more alluring to Karl than the simplicity of the dreamscape was its sense of possibility. As he looked over that dream beach, he was poised eternally at the moment of every imminent action. Everything seemed within his grasp there: sex, success, prowess, and passion. Karl felt that all he need do was climb the lifeguard’s towering chair, or follow the bridge’s certain path over the water, to find everything the future promised. Yet he was aware that he need do nothing more than be there, on that beach in the thick, humid air, and everything he wanted in the abstract would be his. It was a singular, sensual sensation at the instant before the fulfillment of every aspiration.

  “Karl? Caroline? It’s six,” Sven said quietly from the other side of the door.

  Karl turned from his side to his stomach and moved his arms over his head on the pillow. He wanted to stay on that beach, by the bridge over blue water leading to everywhere. He felt so close to every pleasant eventuality. He didn’t want to wake up.

  “Thanks, Sven,” Caroline said clearly, despite the undertone of sleepiness in her voice. “We’re awake.”

  “We have to leave by seven-fifteen to make it to mass,” Sven said, more loudly this time. “I’ve got coffee ready.”

  “Thanks, dear,” Caroline told him. “We’ll be right out.”

  Karl resented being pulled from the dream beach into consciousness. He opened his eyes to the dim light of the guest room and found himself facing the window,
away from Caroline. The dream disappeared, and all that was left of his visit there was an erection and a sense of lingering strength and self-assurance. He acutely felt Caroline’s hand on his bare shoulder as she gently shook him.

  “Wake up, sweetheart,” she urged him. “We have to get up.”

  “Okay,” Karl mumbled agreeably. “Just give me a minute more. You go on to the bathroom.”

  Caroline kissed the bare skin on the top knob of his spine at the base of his neck. Then he felt her weight move the bed as she shifted and rose. He heard the whisper of her robe shifting from the chair at the foot of the bed, and the soft pad of her footsteps as she let herself out of the room.

  When she had closed the door behind her, Karl rose slowly to avoid the predictable head rush and adjusted his insistent penis inside his boxer shorts before striding to the window and rolling up the shade. The morning view out the guest room window was more familiar now, as were the pinkish dawn stealing over the sky and the wet whisper of the arcing jets of the sprinkler system on the front lawn. He watched as Rob walked a leashed, sniffing Gretchen up the drive to the front door. Evidently, most of the house was up and preparing for the trip to church.

  Karl sighed and left the window with the dream still clinging to the corners of his mind. He knew the place from the dream so well, and it seemed so real, that he thought it must have been an actual place at some point, but he could never find it as fact when he actively searched his memory for beaches he’d been on. Now, as always before, he felt a sense of loss in leaving that dreamscape. The dream had lost its oddness in the many times he’d had it, but its physical and emotional impact was still very real. It left him with a young man’s virility and testosterone-fueled confidence that he could conquer his world and take from it all that he desired.

  Aware of his lingering erection and his wife’s imminent return, he first pulled on a clean pair of jeans. He didn’t want to have to explain or discuss this odd gift of his dream. After he zipped up his secret, he slathered on some deodorant and pulled a fresh white T-shirt over his head. As he was searching his dop kit for his electric razor, Caroline returned to the bedroom and gave him a smile.

  “You’ve lost your bathroom spot,” she informed him. “Melanie just went in for a quick shower.”

  “Thank God I don’t have to pee right away,” Karl said as he shrugged and walked to the small dresser by the window and found his face in the mirror hung on the wall. He turned on his electric razor and, knowing it should have enough charge left in its battery, began to shave, more by feel and familiar habit than by sight in the dim room.

  Caroline sat on the side of the bed with one leg tucked under her and watched him as he shaved. He found her face in the mirror and gave her a wink. The surge of virility wrought by the dream’s landscape and promise still surged through his subconscious like an insistent electrical current. He felt physically enhanced, and the thought of secret purloined sex tempted him as he stole glances of his wife as she watched him admiringly. “You look adorable sitting there,’’ he told her.

  She smiled and stretched in the wake of his compliment, but she said, “I don’t feel adorable.” She sighed and rubbed her temples. “Ooooooh, I’m feeling those cosmopolitans from last night.”

  They had returned to Sven’s the night before to find him and Rob lounging on the sofa with an empty pizza box on the ottoman. By their minimal dress and languid torpor, they gave an unspoken affirmation to Karl’s assumption that they had found something more physically fulfilling to do than go out for dinner. True to his promise, Rob had turned off the television, turned on the stereo, and made the first of several shakers of the strong red cocktail. Karl had faded rather quickly. The day had taxed him to the point that a single cocktail had been enough to send him to bed. He’d left Caroline and Melanie to visit and party with Sven and Rob. Gretchen, however, had decided to keep Karl company. She’d nosed open the guest room door and jumped on the bed, then promptly turned a few times and settled against Karl’s thighs with a deep, satisfied sigh. Rather than chase her off the bed, Karl welcomed her warm presence and decided to let Caroline deal with the dog when she came in to go to sleep.

  “How did you get Gretchen off the bed?” he asked Caroline as he ran the razor in long, even strokes over his neck.

  “Sven bribed her off with a cookie,” Caroline said and laughed. “For a while, I thought it was going to be the three of us for the night. She growled at me when I tried to push her off the bed.”

  Karl finished shaving and ran his fingertips over his face to check his work. Finding himself uniformly smooth, he turned to Caroline and smiled. “Are you going to shower?”

  Caroline shook her head. “We’re going to the beach after church. I’m just going to get dressed and save my shower for before we have to leave.”

  “I’m going to do the same,” Karl said. “I have one more clean shirt,” he said as he strode back to his suitcase, pulled it out, and shook it free of creases.

  “Do you think your jeans will be okay for church?” Caroline asked thoughtfully.

  Karl pulled the shirt over his head and pulled it down to his hips. “Yeah,” he said. “Eight o’clock mass is fairly casual. You get a break for making the effort to get up so early.”

  Caroline stood and took off her robe. Dressed in a small T-shirt and panties, she opened her own suitcase and thumbed through the few folded outfits she found. “Well, I’m going to wear slacks, but I think I can do better than jeans,” she said.

  Karl stepped behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “You’ll look great no matter what you wear,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.

  Caroline turned and put her arms around his waist. “Seems like a waste of a morning at the beach, to be out the door on the way to church,” she said as she looked up into his face. “I can think of other things I’d rather be doing.”

  Karl laughed and took her buttocks in his hands. Squeezing them as he pulled her to him, he said, “It must be something in the salty air. I notice both Rob and Sven had that freshly fucked look on their faces when we got here last night.”

  “Ssssssh,” Caroline shushed him as she tried not to laugh. “You noticed that, too, huh?”

  Karl laughed and let go of her ass to wrap her in a strong hug. “Can I get a rain check?”

  “Absolutely.’’ Caroline said as she moved back out of his arms and turned once more to her suitcase. “We have next weekend home alone, remember?”

  “That’s right,” Karl said and stretched. “Melanie will be in New York, and you and I now have plans.”

  “Promise?” Caroline asked as she pulled out a pair of dark slacks and held them by the waist to let the legs unfurl.

  “Uh-huh,” Karl said gutturally.

  “For now, you better get yourself some coffee and let me get dressed,” Caroline told him.

  “Damn,” Karl said with heavy disappointment as he turned to leave her.

  “See you in a minute,” Caroline told him as he closed the door behind him.

  Karl found Rob and Sven drinking coffee at the kitchen table while Gretchen noisily finished her bowl of kibble by the back door. “Good morning, guys,” Karl said happily, feeling a good mood steal over him. The energy of his dream had spilled into his morning.

  “Good morning,” Rob echoed.

  “Make yourself some coffee,” Sven told him.

  As Karl fixed his mug the way he liked it, he noticed Rob was rather well dressed, while Sven was dressed much as Karl was, in jeans and a navy sweater. “You look sharp,” he commented to Rob as he sat down.

  “Thanks,” Rob said. “I can’t be like you cradle Catholics. If I’m going to church, I feel I should dress up a little.”

  “So, you’re coming to mass?” Karl asked him before he took a sip of coffee.

  “I am,” Rob replied decisively. “In fact, I’m going to spend the day with you.”

  “Well, that’s cool,” Karl said happily. “I didn’t know if y
ou had plans today or not.”

  “I did,’’ Rob confessed. “Then I heard how Frank treated Sven yesterday, and I decided I was going to make a point of being around, so if he shows his ass like he did yesterday, I can punch him in the head.”

  “My boyfriend the pit bull,” Sven joked. “I told him that wouldn’t be necessary, but he feels he has to stick up for me.”

  “You’re damn right I do,” Rob said seriously. “You may be his son, but you’re my partner, and I’m sick and tired of him thinking he can treat you like shit and get away with it.”

  “Don’t make a big deal out of it, Rob,” Sven said dismissively. “He’s never going to change. It’s just how he and I interact. You’d have a better day if you just took off and headed back up to Palm Beach. I’ll be okay.”

  “Shut up, Sven,” Rob said evenly. “If you won’t take up for yourself, I will. I’m dead serious. Your father will think twice about being such a jerk with me there.”

  “Suit yourself,” Sven said. “But don’t be surprised if he says something.”

  Karl looked at his brother, then his brother’s partner. “I’ll back Rob up,” he said. “I thought Dad’s behavior yesterday was inexcusable, and I told him so. You don’t deserve to be talked to like I wouldn’t talk to Gretchen.”

  Sven smiled, then chuckled. “Okay. I appreciate it. But remember, his tongue cuts both ways. It’s really better if you don’t get all up in that. He’s just an irritable old man.”

  “Whatever,” Rob said. “We’re coming back here and going to the beach after church, right?”

  “That’s the plan,” Karl said. “I can’t imagine flying all the way to Florida, staying within spitting distance of the beach, and never setting foot on it while I was here.”

  “Melanie and Caro are really looking forward to it,” Sven told Rob. “We’ll have about four hours to hang out together before we’ll have to head back over to Mom and Dad’s so these guys can drop off Mom’s car and say good-bye. Are you sure you’re up for all that?”