The UnAmericans: Stories (24 page)

Fridays were busy
outside Alameda Point. Women shouldered past Alexi, coiffed and perfumed and in pumps and pearls and fuzzy sweaters, calling for their children to hurry up and take their places in the inspection line. For the past twelve months, Alexi had only known the other side to these afternoons, the men’s collective anticipation of those sacred hours in the cramped visiting room or, on sunny days, at the picnic tables in the yard—men who had stopped, at a certain point, asking Alexi about his own family once it was painfully clear they were never coming to see him.

Standing at the entrance now, watching his ex-wife and son pull up to the correctional facility, Alexi felt jumpy and nervous and a little out of breath. And not just about his release, or the fact that Katherine was giving him their son for the weekend, but because she’d agreed to come to begin with. He wondered what it meant—a move toward forgiveness, maybe nothing at all. He couldn’t even tell if, after a year inside, he looked any different. Maybe a few pounds thinner but wearing the same slacks and button-down they’d known him in last, clutching, in a flimsy plastic bag, all his remaining possessions: his wallet, containing a mere twenty-two dollars; house keys that would no longer work; the sports section from the morning he was brought in, August 12, 1950, which felt like a cruel joke, as if flaunting that on top of everything else, he had missed the Yankees’ repeat as world champions.

“Benny!” he said, peering into the car. Then, turning to the driver’s seat, “Katherine!”

But she wouldn’t look at him. She just sat there, checking her watch as if frustrated that she’d never get these seconds of her life back, while Benny crawled into the backseat for his suitcase. It was technically
Alexi’s
suitcase, and he had a sudden image of everything else he’d once owned in Los Angeles, before the house was seized earlier that year and Katherine had dragged all of his belongings, his books and clothes and excellent record collection, out to the street on garbage day and moved with Benny to a tiny studio in Palms.

“Drop him at Ellen’s Sunday’s morning,” Katherine said, staring at the dashboard, and Alexi found, with a pang, that she still had a disorienting effect on him: her high cheekbones and light brown eyes and delicate hands gripping the wheel, so small they always made his own in comparison feel massive and clumsy. But he noticed, too, the lines that had begun to deepen across her forehead and how pale she was for summer, as if she’d barely had a chance to go outside.

And then, finally, she met his gaze. All at once everything he’d been planning to tell her, the carefully crafted apologies he’d been working on so much of the year—suddenly all of that was moot, seeing from her such a look of disdain it was clear she wanted him erased from her life. “She’s on 28th and Church,” she said flatly, scribbling down her sister’s address, all their road trips to visit Ellen in San Francisco apparently cast away and forgotten, some other couple’s history.

Benny climbed out of the car and ran to him. Alexi stroked his soft hair and breathed in everything at once, gum and sleep and cheese on his breath, wondering, if just through smell and touch, he could determine whether his nine-year-old was okay. “I missed you,” Alexi said, and right then something seemed to kick inside Katherine and she bolted out of the driver’s seat. She pulled their son toward her, pressing his face to her blouse, and whispered, “Call me at Aunt Ellen’s if you need
anything
.” And when Benny said, “Jeez, Mom, it’s just two days,” she reached through the open car window, pulled a five-dollar bill from her pocketbook and thrust it into his hand. “In case of emergency,” she said, as if Alexi weren’t standing right there, as if Benny weren’t going away with his own father but a derelict stranger, hurtling her boy into the wild.

She kissed Benny’s head, then got back in the car without even a wave goodbye to Alexi, and he led his son across the lot to the Plymouth he’d arranged to borrow for the weekend, rusty and dilapidated with candy wrappers and cola bottles cluttering the backseat. He slid in beside Benny and drove out of the gates and onto the bridge, where all at once the San Francisco skyline came into view. Flawless, if it weren’t for Katherine in the rearview mirror, as if signaling that the three of them would never be together in a car again, the windows down, her cheek on his shoulder, his hand on her calf.

He sank his foot onto the gas and the cluster of cars surrounding him, Katherine’s included, quickly disappeared. Then he glanced sideways at his son. As a baby, Benny had looked so much like him that even the sight of his child, sitting in his high chair or napping in his crib, used to startle Alexi so intensely he’d forget why he entered the room in the first place. He’d read somewhere that there was a biological reason for it, that it afforded fathers the kind of closeness and recognition mothers inherently felt after pregnancy. But over the past year Benny had begun to resemble him less, his curly black hair now wavy and light like Katherine’s, his once-olive skin so pale it was like the whole veiny map of his interior was open for public viewing. He’d shot up maybe four inches since they’d seen each other last but hadn’t put on any weight—though maybe, Alexi thought, his son could work the gangliness in his favor if he played the smart, serious card with girls. He knew from Katherine that once again Benny had gotten all A’s, about which Alexi was deeply proud and had been bragging to everyone inside.

“What’s your favorite subject?” he asked his son.

“Science, and probably history.”

Alexi nodded. These seemed like solid answers. “Who’s your best teacher?”

“It’s August,” the boy said, looking at him curiously. “I’m on summer vacation.”

“Ah,” Alexi said. He pulled off at 19th and drove along the park. He’d never liked San Francisco. Its beauty had always felt so showy, with its choppy blue water and steep, craggy hills and all those frilly houses painted candy-egg colors. Alexi was an actor and it had always felt to him, visiting the city, that he was on the set of San Francisco even when in the middle of it, even drinking coffee or eating a sandwich or waiting outside the ferry terminal. His closest friend from inside, Karl Mueller, had set him up with the car, along with a friend-of-a-friend’s apartment for the weekend. But the directions were complex and confusing, and as Alexi backed out of a one-way street, then headed down a dead end, he found himself pining for the wide, no-nonsense boulevards of Los Angeles.

“I have it all planned out,” Alexi said. “I’ve got us a great place for the weekend”—if he ever found it, he thought, silently cursing yet another one-way street to nowhere—“and we’ll do it up, a steak dinner tonight, pancakes for breakfast.”

“Is that what
you
want?” his son said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your first weekend out.”

How grown-up of Benny to consider his needs, Alexi thought. He’d always been that way. Alexi remembered picking him up from nursery school years ago, and the teacher telling him that when they were playing musical chairs and the girl left without a seat began to cry, Benny immediately stood up and offered his. He’d relished seeing his son through the teacher’s admiring eyes, though lately Alexi had been worrying about the line between generosity and patsiness growing murkier now that Benny had been alone with his mother. He’d sensed, in his calls to Katherine from Alameda Point, the weight that had been thrust on the boy. Usually she’d pass the phone off to Benny the moment she heard Alexi’s voice. But the few times she relented, her responses seemed as predictable as the clicking sounds they always heard five minutes in, saying things like “It’s been rough, but we’re getting through it,” or “We’re finding ways to brighten up the place in Palms,” as if it were perfectly acceptable that their nine-year-old was shouldering half of that “we.” And though he was out now, though he’d been offered his friend’s pool house in L.A. for a month while he, supposedly, figured out what was next in his life, Alexi knew that having a weekend dad wouldn’t save Benny from the year he’d been left without one.

The apartment Karl had set him up with was on a hill at the crest of Buena Vista Park, tidy and bright with a Murphy bed in the living room. On the kitchen table was a note from Karl’s friend’s friend, wishing them a great weekend and offering whatever was left in the icebox. Alexi was touched that someone he’d never met would be so kind.

Benny walked to the window and Alexi followed him. It offered yet another unobstructed view of the skyline, as if the entire city had been built to brag about the same postcard image. Alexi looked out at the treetops, the low-slung buildings and the water beyond, the light so sharp he wondered whether his eyes were still adjusting after his time indoors or if it was, simply, a truly beautiful day. Even the undershirts fluttering from the clothesline seemed particularly white, the trash bins on the sidewalk a glorious green—and though he had no idea where Ellen’s apartment fit within this scene, the fact that she and Katherine were out there somewhere, that they too could be going for steaks tonight and pancakes in the morning but doing everything in their power to avoid running into Alexi, suddenly made him feel queasy and warm, and he backed away from the window, turned to his son and said, “Forget San Francisco. Let’s blow it off and head to Napa. That’s how I want to spend my first weekend out—to relax somewhere, just the two of us. Who knows, maybe we’ll make it up to Oregon.”

“Really?” the kid said, sounding more excited than he had all day, and Alexi, suddenly excited himself, said, “Really.”
This
was what it meant to be out in the world again. To change plans on a whim, to speed down that narrow one-way street with his son beside him, leaving the city behind as he steered onto the bridge, the windows down, the possibilities flying everywhere.

S
OMEWHERE IN
Napa, Alexi realized he had no idea where he was. Part of the problem, he knew, was that he’d been there only once, three years ago, and he hadn’t been driving. He had been drunk in the back with Julia Wexler, the film’s head writer and cause for so much of the trouble in Alexi’s marriage to begin with, while the husband-and-wife producer team drove them from winery to winery. Stella and Jack had been going to Napa for the past fifteen years, even before it
was
Napa, when it was just a handful of vintner families scattered across the valley, trying to make a living post-Prohibition, and that entire weekend had felt meandering and glorious, discovery after discovery.

Now he was lost, and it was dark, and the towering oak trees and skinny dirt roads that had once felt so inviting seemed menacing and sinister. For almost an hour he couldn’t find a single place to stop. Benny was staring out the window, his cheek against the glass, and Alexi passed orchards and cattle farms and rickety wood houses, feeling more and more hopeless, until finally, in the distance, he saw an inn and pulled over.

“Stay here,” he told his son, and jogged inside. It was no-frills but perfectly adequate, with overstuffed leather chairs and dark green walls, like a hunting lodge without the guns or taxidermied animals. Through the glass doors Alexi saw picnic tables, and his mood immediately lifted as he envisioned a decent night’s sleep after a year on that stiff, dirty cot and a lovely breakfast on the patio in the morning, coffee and juice, eggs and fresh muffins. The pretty redhead behind the desk was reading a thick paperback she set down then and said, “Welcome to the Pinecone. Just you?”

“One room, two beds,” Alexi said. “For me and my son.”

The woman smiled at him. Her hair was pulled away from her face and Alexi admired her long, creamy neck, the tiny, almost inconsequential buttons climbing up her blouse. It had been twelve and a half months. There had been a time in his life when it would have felt so easy to lean over the counter and ask this woman when she got off work, then meet her for a drink, or three or four. But her skin, her lips, the sparkly blue stones in her delicate earlobes—all of it gave him a jolt of sadness, just another reminder Katherine wanted nothing to do with him.

“That’ll be eighteen dollars,” she said, and Alexi cleared his throat. If he paid for this room, he and Benny would be sharing a pack of gum for dinner. He realized he had no idea what things cost in Napa—everything had always been paid for, Stella and Jack opening doors to every inn, winery, restaurant, and all that was ever expected of Alexi was that he glide right in. He was struck by a feeling he hadn’t had in so long, a feeling that had thrown him into a crippling panic when he was in his early twenties and first auditioning: of being an imposter, a single step away from being found out. He raked a hand through his hair and looked at the woman. A trio of brass mirrors hung behind her and he could see himself reflected back, dozens of tiny blinking Alexis.

“Just give me a minute. Let me get my wallet from the car,” he said, backing out. He let himself into the driver’s side and took a long breath. Benny was bobbing along to some radio song that sounded to Alexi like all backup vocals. “It was crummy inside. We’ll find something better,” he said, and threw the car in reverse.