Good Kids: A Novel (24 page)

I composed a mantra for myself:
Do not think of Julie or you will die
. I took even more comfort in this: Soon, I would have my father to distract me, to fill my head with his designs. I was going to take a little time off at the loft. It was time to fall back on the Man.

T
he door to the loft was never locked. Allison was a Native New Yorker and trusted the city to protect her. It was this gesture of aristocratic faith that showed the loft was truly hers and not my father’s, though they had moved here together, just after the wedding, ten years before. Bought and furnished with Mueller money, its contents were Allison’s to gamble.

Closing the noiseless door behind me, I trod lightly on the narrow green carpet, inch-deep, that extended from the door across a hardwood vastness to the barely perceptible kitchen. I wished I’d grown up on this enclosed prairie, where privacy was achieved most often by placing sheer distance between yourself and others, rather than by shutting yourself in some kind of enclosure, such as a room. I picked up a chew toy—a disemboweled duck that could no longer squeak, softened by spit and teeth—and lobbed it like a Molotov cocktail through the empty space. Miles exploded from behind a chair, barking. The quiet shattered satisfyingly, all at once. Allison and my father looked up from their desks in the study area, and we all joined the dog in making noise.

“So here I am, guys,” I said.
Guys
was the only term of address I’d found that could signify
Dad and Stepmom
. I dropped my luggage to the floor to punctuate the announcement, the sound of the straps sliding off my back like the hiss of a falling bomb, followed by the thud of canvas on wood.

My father put down his book—
Alpine Castles: An Illustrated Compendium
—and for a moment I could see the distress on his face, before he remembered himself and smiled.

I was not good news. There was much that was homeless about me. I had my messenger bag for my MacBook and notebooks, my guitar, and my black Eastern Mountain Sports zeppelin, full of clothes, receipts, contracts, tax documents. As soon as they were off my back I realized how burdened I’d been the whole subway ride from Kennedy, and what a burden I was. I was tired, and must have looked it. Worse, what I wanted was not quite reasonable. I wanted to claim a couch and stretch my feet—the grown son home for a visit. But I had not grown up here. And while my father lived here, in this canny real estate investment of Bruce Mueller’s, it was not quite his to offer.

I had texted my father that morning and informed him I’d be paying a visit, but I hadn’t brought up spending the night. If it was not a good time, I reasoned, I could always couch-surf across the ocean of musicians in Brooklyn. Now that I was here, I saw that showing up was in and of itself a major imposition, for my father and Allison. Telling me not to stay would be just as bad an experience for them as enduring my presence. It would make them feel like bad people. And to welcome me in would be to share the loft with my father’s past, a memory of an old family, an old wife. I was a Catch-22. Allison and my father knew I knew this. But we went through the motions of ecstatic reunion anyway. My father placed the ice cream bowl he’d been cradling in his lap on the floor, and rose from his armchair to hug me. Allison silenced the gasping espresso machine and crossed the hardwood expanse that lay between the kitchen and the door to take my hands in hers and kiss me on both cheeks.

“What a keenly delightful surprise,” my father said.

“It’s such a good feeling to have you here, Josh,” said Allison.

“A guest from Hollywood,” my father said. They looked at each other.

“Sorry,” I said. “Should I not have flung myself on you like this?”

They shook their heads. “It’s just that when you said you were coming we hadn’t anticipated so many bags, maybe,” my father said.

I felt sorry for my father. His loyalties were so sharply divided he had to treat everyone lukewarmly. When your wife and your son have opposing needs, you chart a course between.

“I promise I won’t stay here longer than pragmatically necessary,” I said.

“We want this to be a home to you, Josh,” said Allison. “But we’re going through . . .” She put her hands on the crown of her head. “A weird time. A deeply weird time. We’ll be able to explain very soon.”

“Quite so,” my father said. He put his hands on the crown of his head, too, making himself symmetrical with Allison. “We hate to be so enigmatic, Josher. But I guess the issue is: What, approximately, are your plans?”

“How long,” asked Allison, “do you need to stay?”

“Maybe just tonight?” my father suggested. “And maybe you can articulate what it is you’re doing here?”

I said that I wanted to stay one night, and visit an old friend in Boston the next day.

“That sounds just fine,” my father said. “And who, pray tell, is your Boston friend?” As he formed the question, he lowered his arms and made his hands dance before Miles’s face, absentmindedly mesmerizing the animal.

“Khadijah,” I said. “Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn.”

My father scooped up the eviscerated duck and threw it. “No mercy, Miles!” he said.

Miles fell upon his quarry, whipped it back and forth to break its neck. A family feeling mushroomed between us, one of those clouds of intimate silence. Allison must have felt her semi-outsider status, because she straightened the reading material on a coffee table: a mock-up of the article she must have been editing, called “Luxury on the Road to Marfa,” and some literature that was clearly my father’s,
De Gaulle
and
Amnesty International Report: Torture in the ’80s
.

“I broke up with Julie,” I said.

Allison hugged me. She murmured “sorry” and “oh” and “sweetie” in different combinations in my ear. I couldn’t feel what I’d just said. I knew that the breakup was hovering over me, a piano hung from the ceiling by a fraying rope. It would drop soon, but it hadn’t hit me yet.

“The engagement is off,” I informed my father, over her shoulder. He paced, holding the book behind his back. “That’s why I need to stay here tonight. Julie and I are over, so tomorrow Khadijah and I are going to have an informal meal.”

Allison pulled back and stared at me.

“There’s this falafel truck in Jamaica Plain,” I continued, “that’s actually pretty acclaimed.”

My father considered the news. “Why don’t the two of us road-trip?” he suggested. Allison redirected her stare, toward him. “You and Khadijah can be informal with each other, I can see an old friend who’s very sick.”

“Who?” Allison asked.

“A guy from college you never met, he has cancer. I want to see if he can still hold down a bottle of wine.” He averted his eyes to the green carpet. “Very sad.”

Allison took my father’s hand and escorted him to the far side of the loft. There followed a clenched-looking discussion to which I was not privy. Here I was, an envoy from the past, and already my father was floating away with me, to the city of Nancy. The way he had paced when I’d mentioned the daughter of his former lover, like a scientist struck by a solution to a problem he’d been slaving over for thirteen years—I could only imagine the effect on my stepmother. But after they were done speaking, Allison began to wipe down the countertop, and my father warned me he expected an early start in the morning.

That night, failing to sleep on the foldout couch, I heard their fighting: harsh whispers merged in the dark. But by dawn, Allison was stoical, gym-bound, murmuring to herself as she zipped her bag, shook on her hoodie. My father made her coffee, carried it to her on a saucer; she tugged his beard. I waited, pretending
to sleep, until they had said good-bye—it was the least I could do to allow them this tiny solitude. I took a shower while my father did his push-ups, his salutes to the sun. It was only 7:30 when we walked seven blocks to a garage—the car had sat in storage for fourteen years, four years longer than Allison and my father had been married. It was an MG convertible, chewing gum green. Allison had a car for daily use, and my father usually didn’t believe in driving, so the MG, her spare, an old gift from Bruce and Merrie, was never touched. You could tell by looking at it. It projected dormant lust, like a sleeping beauty in a tower waiting to be roused. And it gave every appearance of immortality. No rust, despite a long hibernation. No stains on the leather. Only a layer of dust so thick I was able to draw a heart on the hood.

We coasted from the garage in the Meatpacking District up the Henry Hudson into Sunday as the sky shed its pink skin and turned blue. It wasn’t yet November.

“Maybe we’ll have lunch in the North End. New Haven’s better for pizza, but we’ll be in Boston before noon at the speed we’re going now.”

I nodded sleepily. “The Italians aren’t really about breakfast, as a culture.”

“You said it.” This point of accord wedged something open. I could almost hear it.

“I’m not sure whether I want more children, Joshy,” he said. “Allison would like to have a pair of them, is the issue.”

The oaks on either side of the highway tried to pet the car. We were on the flank of Harlem now, with the river on our left, screened by leaves.

“Your stepmother and I went for a stroll in the park a couple years ago. We got to the top of this hill, and it was raining. She said, ‘You must have two children with me or you have to leave me,’ and I said okay, we could have some kids. But I don’t respond well to ultimatums. I might like to move to the South of France, very soon. I’m a creative animal, and I want to write a book of essays. I mean, hell, I might decide to go to Africa, write it there.”

“Have you not been able to focus on the essays the way you’d like over the last ten years?”

“We’re not all musical gentlemen like yourself.” He shot me a furious look that smoldered away in two seconds. “Some of us working people, we have responsibilities that we often find prevent us from concentrating on the artistic pursuit at hand. Or romantic pursuits, I might add—Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn! A hubbub, after all these years.” He grinned, involuntarily, and my happiness stunned me.

“I’ve worked,” he continued. “I’ve raised children. And, now, to speak truthfully, Son, drawing up new additions for the house is a lot easier than conceptualizing some sort of lyrical screed. Allison doesn’t give a shit what I do in my spare time, but she doesn’t like it when I get into bed talking about my objections to rich people and excessive breeding. When I have to tell the truth, I become shitty to people, and I want to be nice. How do you think about shit honestly, and still be nice? When I actually let myself look at how shit is, I either have to forget about it and go draw some new gables on graph paper or I can stay in it, I can root in it, like a Scorsese movie, or maybe more a Van Gogh, and be fucked up in the head, and mean. I want to be nice. So how do I be an essayist?” He paused for breath. “Sorry. I’m going off in an unbecoming manner. Sorry.”

He took a joint from his backpack, which I held in my lap. He pressed the joint to the dash lighter, elbows on the wheel, got it started. He offered me a drag, but I turned him down.

“I’m too self-conscious to be stoned around family,” I explained.

“Oh, that’s psychologically interesting.” He finished an exhalation. “See, I prize my relationship with Allison. There’s also the little problem of what I’d do for work without Bruce.” I knew that the tiny nonprofit he’d founded after we got back from the island had continued to benefit from Allison’s father’s support, but I didn’t know whether new donors had been found. “We’re a pretty hungry animal, even though it’s just me and a couple interns writing reports on Zimbabwean farming.

“I suppose,” he said, and dragged again, “the idea of a couple of little girls running around me in circles shouting ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ that is somewhat appealing. But I’m scared beyond reason. I’m fifty-eight years old. It’s the rest of my life, another kid meandering through whatever fields of bullshit he’ll meander through, and finally fetching up on college after the whole thing and needing so much money, which would leave me begging Bruce for more of it.” He turned over the joint in his fingers, watching it burn.

“It’s a good thing, just moving through the world as a solitary grown-up,” I said speculatively. “Maybe you want to chill for a while. Tell me something.” I worked up my courage. “Did you like having children the first time?”

“Oh yes. We were so starry-eyed about you and your sister. The children of the future. The horrible poems I wrote about you, when you were a baby! I still have them somewhere.”

“What about— Didn’t you say you were going to write an essay about how destructive having children had become, or how destructive we figured out it was, after it was too late, or whatever?”

“Sure, but we didn’t think about that
then
. We loved the mission of making you, so much that we couldn’t see how—how jagged, shall we say, a combination we were, your mother and I. Well, your mother did see. She didn’t want to get married, you know, she just wanted children, and she was thirty-one, which in those days . . . And there I was. Wait, oops. Did you know that?”

I looked at the cherry of the joint. I hadn’t.

“Oh. Fuck. Sorry. Anyway, I was the one who said we had to marry. I was the one who said we had to make a life together, with our children. I saw it, it was a vision, very clear. That’s probably why things didn’t work. But it was just kind of dangling before me, like an icicle.”

I almost reached across the seat to embrace him. I didn’t know why.

“How do you envision me proceeding?” I asked, a minute later. “From this point in my life?”

“I can see you with Khadijah,” he said. “But I can’t be objective.”

“Why not?”

He hesitated. “Have you ever read that John Donne poem about the flea? John Donne’s lost his lover. They’ve split up but they’re hanging out together, he and his lover, and he sees this flea on the table between them. And, man, does he covet the soul of that flea. Insect, he says, you’re the only place our blood can mix, you who have bitten us both.” He nodded. “That’s you and Khadijah—the flea, in a positive sense. The last place Nancy and I are together.”