Envy (13 page)

12

Will and his father are at La Luncheonette, a lit-tle bistro all the way over on the West Side. From where he's sitting, Will can see the red stack of a barge moving slowly up the Hudson through a gray-green slice of the river. “So, how's your love life?” Will asks his dad.

“Not bad. Yours?”

“Never mind. You're the art-world ingénue having an affair with his wealthy patroness.” His father smiles, a little wearily, Will thinks.

“Considering my advanced age and modest circumstances, I think it's going well enough. At least my wealthy patroness hasn't voiced any complaints.” He holds up one hand to flag down the waitress, a Vietnamese no older than eighteen and very beautiful, her shining hair gathered into a chignon. It's the sort of seemingly artless arrangement of hair that might take a woman hours to pull off; in the case of this girl, Will would bet she really has just slipped down the wine-cellar stairs for a moment, twisted it into a coil, and skewered it with a pencil so that it remains there, at the nape of her neck. The few strands that have escaped look like a painter's finishing touch, highlighting her cheekbones and calling attention to the line of her jaw.

“Not ready to order,” his father says, “just wanted to see you close up.”

Will braces himself for a tart response, almost closing his eyes so he doesn't have to see his father being rebuffed, but instead, the girl beams at him. She ducks her head so close to his that for a second Will thinks she's going to kiss him.

“Bonjour, mon ami intéressant,”
she says.

“What did she call you?” Will watches the girl go to the bar for the glass of water his father asked for.

“Nothing scandalous. Her interesting friend, that's all. I eat here every so often.”

Will raises his eyebrows; his father shrugs.

“Apparently you've reached the age where you can get away with anything,” Will says.

“We'll see.” His father picks up his knife and slips its blade between the uneven tines of his fork, straightening them by leveraging one against another. When he's satisfied that the job is done, he polishes the fork on his napkin and replaces it on the table. “We'll see what I can get away with,” he says.

“You make it sound as if you're about to be subjected to a test of your not inconsiderable charm.”

His father smiles and takes a sip from the water the waitress has put before him. “Charlotte's husband showed up last week.”

“I didn't even know she was married.”

“I did. But the way she told it, she made it sound like a nonissue. Said they hadn't lived together as man and wife for more than ten years.”

“So why's he dropping by?”

“It's all on account of a cockroach. Two cockroaches, in fact.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“He's having his apartment fumigated. Girlfriend found a roach in her shoe.”

“And?”

“And?”

“You said two. Two cockroaches.”

“Oh, right. Another bug set up shop in the cheese drawer of the fridge.”

“So he just comes back any time he wants?”

“Guess so. Has a key. And a room.”

“You never noticed the room?”

“I thought it was a guest room. No personal effects on view, and it's not as if I go around checking closets and drawers.”

Will takes off his tie, folds it, and puts it in his jacket pocket. “Was he civil?” he asks his father.

“Very civil. Friendly. Put his hand out to shake mine—this was at breakfast the next morning. All of us sitting down together eating muffins and reading the
Times.
Fancy muffins, size of footballs. He went out for them. And for juice. Strawberries.” Will's father shakes his head. “He told me the mayor wasn't even five feet tall.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I don't know. Must've been something in the paper, but it stuck in my head. All week I've been thinking, apropos of nothing, ‘The mayor's not even five feet tall.' Guess I'm a little discombobulated by the whole setup.”

“He'd come in the previous night?”

“Middle of the night. ‘Who's that?' I ask Lottie when I hear the door, someone rummaging around in the kitchen. ‘Must be David, ' she says.”

“‘David who?' I ask.”

“‘No one, ' she says.”

“‘No one?' I ask.”

“‘My husband.'”

“‘I thought he was an ex-husband.'”

“‘He is, ' she says, ‘he is for all practical purposes.' ” Will's father takes another swallow of water. “At the word
practical,
she gives me a little goose down belowdecks, sort of pats me there. Then she goes back to sleep. Next morning she wants to, you know, but I can't, uh, can't . . .” Will raises his eyebrows. “Can't muster myself for the job at hand,” his father clarifies. “I mean there's the guy sleeping on the other side of the wall.”

“I'm sorry, Dad. That must have been weird.”

“Guess so. Kind of disorienting, anyway. Can't concentrate. Went to the movies three times in two days.” Will purses his lips, shakes his head. Going to the movies has always been his father's response to stress. When Will and Mitch were growing up, if his father had had what he called a “five-flick week” that was reason enough for them to behave very well.

“Also, and here's the worst of it, well, not the worst, maybe. Trying to be polite, I guess, the guy keeps dragging me over to where Lottie's hung my prints. Wants to talk about them. Wants me to talk about them. Asks questions. Not the stupid kind, but still.”

“Oh boy.”

“You remember which ones she bought.”

“Of course. How could I not?” Will thinks of his first look at one of those photographs. Uncharacteristically, his father had mailed him a print, sandwiched between two pieces of cardboard joined with duct tape. “Look,” Will had said to Carole, who didn't glance up from the pile of mail she was sorting, pulling out the catalogs to add to the recycling bin. He laid the photograph on the dining table, and she walked around and stood beside him so she could see the image right side up. Briefly, he'd considered keeping it from her; he couldn't say whether this was selfishness or kindness or a murky tangle of both.

“It's sort of . . .” She stopped, her lips together, and sucked inside her teeth, leaving just a line where they'd been, one of her many strategies for suppressing tears. “Beautiful,” she managed, nodding. She had her hands on her hips and her feet were planted a little apart, as if she were about to begin a set of calisthenics. Will remembers this, because it looked so odd, intentional, as if it might be another grief suppressant, equally ineffective, because her cheeks were wet; tears were running down her neck.

“It is, isn't it?” He picked up the photograph, careful to hold it by the edges, to keep the oil from his fingers from marring the image.

How had this happened? Was it Luke who'd given his grandfather this new vision, one both tender and exalted? Could he have shown him the view from on high, shown him what God or a god might see were he to look at humankind, creatures who greeted death with starched curtains and polished door knockers? McCaddam's Funeral Home, with its swept steps and braided mat, plumped cushions on the porch swing, a sign whose letters were painted with care. Will had paused on those steps the first time he entered, noting where faint ruled lines had ensured that whoever made the letters would keep them absolutely straight. Here was a house where Death, no matter how punctilious, wouldn't hesitate to spend a night, confident that pots were scoured and toilets scrubbed. Perhaps wearing white gloves so as to check along the picture moldings and the tops of door and window frames, just to see, as in the old TV commercial: Had everything been dusted?

Inside, across the silent room with the too-short casket, that much more obscene for being child-sized, Carol was sitting next to his mother, her head in his mother's lap, her eyes open, her face expressionless. His mother's hand moved over his wife's head, smoothly and steadily, like the pendulum of a big clock, a nearly frictionless arc marking the passage of time. His mother wasn't brisk with Carole as she was with him. It was easier to love his wife, perhaps. After all, Carole never baited her like he did.

Will has always found his mother reliable, industrious, and reticent, if not actually guarded. She doesn't seem to have much of a sense of humor, and her feelings, though spontaneous, are controlled; they never carry her away. He wonders sometimes if the mother he knows might not be a deliberate construction, a false front assembled to disguise the more unusual and complicated structure behind it, but then he has to ask himself if this idea might not issue from his desire for a less emotionally circumspect mother. A mother who is . . . who is what? Indulgent, he guesses.

At some point during that long afternoon, that endless day, Carole sat up and his mother stood to retrieve his father, who was, they all assumed, still in the old station wagon with the fake-wood side panels, the dog fence in place behind the front seat, even though it had been years since he'd had any occasion to pick up or deliver an animal. Will's father understood the pain of animals. The suffering of a dog was suffering for which he had an arsenal of responses. But what was it that could cure, or even assuage, human misery? Will imagined his father with one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the key, which he hadn't removed from the ignition. Possibly he hadn't moved since turning off the engine and was frozen to the car's vinyl seat, hidden by the reflection on the windshield, as motionless as one of his own perplexing still lives. But when Will looked out the window, he saw his father kneeling on the sidewalk with his head under the black cloth, peering through his big box camera at the funeral home.

“Hank!” his mother said, and she said the name again, more loudly, but Will's father didn't answer, and she left him there.

The funeral home was in fact a
home,
a white clapboard house built in the thirties, with round wood columns, copper rain gutters oxidized green, meticulously painted black trim and window frames, dormers on the roof, a stone chimney, a brass door knocker cast in the shape of a hand, fingers curled to rap the polished plate beneath them, starched white curtains hanging in freshly washed windows that reflected the nearby lake, itself lit by the bright sun, each pane shining silver—it almost hurt to look at them.

Will's father took his time under the black cloth, exposing one negative after another while, inside, Will completed arrangements for having Luke's body cremated.

“Didn't you want to come in, say good-bye?” Will asked before his parents drove away.

He leaned into the driver's-side window, and his father looked at him. He shook his head. “I'm sorry, Will,” he said. “I thought I could, but I can't.” His father got out of the car and hugged him, a long hug, longer than any in memory, Will keenly conscious of his father's body and the comfort it offered him. Flesh of his flesh. He remembers, after the accident, thinking the words over and over, applying them to his son and not, until that moment, to his father. After, when they'd released each other, they stood in the bright sun, silent and even shy, each man, Will is sure, unable to dismiss the feeling of the other's silent crying, how fearsome it was, to feel a man's back shake under your touch.

“This David character,” Will's father is saying to him now, “he has a lot to say about each photograph, some of it the expectable claptrap, negative space and kinetic something or other, plus a few genuine comments here and there. Bends my ear for an hour. Very complimentary, but I found myself wanting to punch him.”

“Yeah,” Will says. “I kind of feel like I want to, too.”

But what Will really feels is a grudging bond with the man, whoever he is. He expects people to be impressed by his father's work. Especially by the prints Charlotte bought, six among a series of thirty that will be published as a monograph in the coming year.

His father's camera had looked at McCaddam's straight on from the sidewalk, so the photograph presented only the front of the building with its painted door and clean windows, but, curiously, the effect was of seeing it from a distance, or a great height; it implied perspective. To look at the image was to understand that we are mortal, all of us, and that in the moments we know this, we're afraid, and that when it comes down to brass tacks, this fear doesn't inspire sonnets or arias or Impressionism so much as it does the determination to do very well the small habitual thing we do every day: keep house.

Brass tacks. If those weren't the weapons of a housewife, what were?

In the year after Luke's death, Will's father made a pilgrimage up and down and all over New York, Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, even up as far as Augusta, Maine, taking photographs of funeral homes, small mom-and-pop places, each image composed so that the viewer saw the business as if he had hesitated on the sidewalk, paused to take a breath, gather resolve, say a prayer: whatever was required to prepare himself to walk the path and ring the bell. This was as far as Will's father ever got—
I
thought I could but I can't
— and over and over, in one city after another, he recorded the same moment, a failure for which Will can't fault his father because he finds it quintessentially human: brave, but not enough to go inside; intelligent, but not enough to understand; awake, but not enough to be entirely conscious. Filled with love, but not enough to overcome fear. Made in the image of God, perhaps, but, if so, like a fifth generation photocopy, or the fax of a fax of a fax, so that even the outline is approximate.

Daniel has asked Will if he is angry at his father for not going inside McCaddam's, and he's told him no. In fact, while looking at the photographs his father has made of funeral homes, Will has been overwhelmed not by anger but by love for him, and the feeling has arrived physically. Deep under his ribs, he's felt something he imagines like the crease made by folding a sheet of paper: a sensation, almost pain, that's shown him a place he might tear more easily.