Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy (5 page)

“Of course,” George replied, and padded to her dresser, against which the portfolio leaned.

“I want to check out the sketches for the new ad campaign again.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Uhm. Apprehensive. The product is a very tricky one to advertise tastefully. I have to remind myself that my proposal is really as good as I think it is.”

Probably that was true, thought George as he placed the portfolio beside her on the mattress and dutifully unzipped it. Just as likely, though, she was looking for any excuse to distract herself from the tiny agonies of Vessna’s feeding.

He pushed the portfolio open and it fell forward, revealing the sketches. Susan reached for them and—with admirable dexterity, considering how fully occupied she already was—spread them out.

“What do you think?” Susan asked.

“Ah,” George hemmed.

Looking at them.

“Em,” he hawed.

Susan looked at him.

“You hate them.”

“No,” he said quickly, “not at all.”

A pause.

“But—”
she prompted.

“It means much to me that you wish to ask,” he said carefully, “but . . . it has been brought to my attention that I have no talent for appraising art.”

She blinked. “Who told you that?”

Embarrassed, he paused a bit before answering. “Uhm . . . Matthew, actually.”

“Is this the same Matthew who never heard of Ibsen?”

“There was a . . . contextual application.”

“Context or not. What a mean thing to say.”

“No, no, he wasn’t being mean. In fact, he didn’t exactly put it that way.”

“What way did he
put
it?”

“Well, we were on our way to question a witness on Sepulveda Boulevard when we passed a street vendor who had a row of paintings for sale.”

“And?”

“And I paused to admire them.” George smiled in recollection. “Oh, they were really quite something. Children and cats with big, round eyes. Colorful circus clowns. One especially striking canvas showed a man in a white spangled outfit, with full lips set in a rather pouty sneer . . .” George tried to assume the expression he was describing. “. . . hair in a kind of pompadour . . .”—he gestured vaguely at the top of his bald forehead, then touched his cheek—“. . . and long sideburns. He was speaking into a microphone.”

“Sounds almost . . . regal.”

“Interesting you should say that. Apparently it was a picture of a . . . a
king
of some sort.” His expression became wistful. “But my favorite was this very amusing canvas. It featured a group of canines in a smoky room, seated around a table, playing a card game. Poker, I think.”

George looked down at Susan’s face. She was smiling broadly, the discomfort of Vessna’s feeding almost forgotten. Encouraged, he continued.

“The pictures weren’t terribly expensive, not by the standards of fine art, anyway, and I thought to buy the dog piece for the living room.”

“Why
didn’t
you?”

“Because Matthew said that people would regard us less seriously if we hung it in the living room. He claimed, in fact, it had kitchenesque connotations.”

“Kitchenesque?”

“Yes, I recall quite clearly. He said that the canvases were just a lot of kitchen.”

“Oh.” She mulled that over for a while. Then said, “You know what I think, Stangya . . .”

He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, pleased that she had used his Tenctonese name.

“What?”

“I think I want your opinion anyway.”

Touched, he turned his full concentration toward the sketches. And as he did so, Susan extracted Vessna from her left breast and repositioned both slip and baby to give the child access to the right. “Come on, Neemu,” she purred, “that’s right. Come on . . .”

And they were both immediately distracted by a rhythmic pounding from another room.

Thump-thump-de-thump.

A short pause and then . . .

Ka-flump.

Thump-thump-de-thump.

Ka-flump.

“What in the world . . .” muttered George. The sound seemed to be coming from Emily’s room, and the repeating pattern made it seem purposeful. He exchanged a glance with Susan, whose expression read,
I don’t know any more about this than you.

“No doubt Emily is engaged in some sort of physical activity,” George surmised.

“Think you should stick your head in and see?” Susan asked.

Thump-thump-de-thump.

Ka-flump.

George briefly considered Emily’s right to privacy; briefly considered too how hard it had been to talk to Emily about the necessity of staying up late, as it was not good for Tenctonese youngsters to get too much sleep. If she was happy and occupied, he didn’t want to disrupt her . . .

Thump-thump-de-thump.

. . . rhythm . . .

Ka-flump.

. .
. and it might be just as effective to speak to her in the morning.

But then the decision was taken out of parental hands—the thumping suddenly stopped and an argument ensued. Buck, their eldest, was shouting at Emily and Emily was shouting back, the words unclear and muffled through the walls, but the emotions obviously high.

George nodded at Susan’s sketches. “To be continued,” he sighed, and strode out of the room, knowing, as he entered the hallway, that Vessna had once again attached herself to mommy.

“Ow,” he heard, softly behind him, “ow, ow, ow, ow, ow . . .”

And heard Buck, much more loudly, just ahead of him, shouting, “You have
no
sense of proportion,
no
sense of time,
no
consideration for anyone else, I’m down there trying to
concentrate
and
you—”

“And I
what?”
Emily fired back. “You moved into your precious RV, you
have
your ‘space,’ if you need quiet, why don’t you—”

“Buck! Emily!” George snapped, in his best martinet fashion. They went abruptly, gratifyingly silent. George shifted immediately to solicitous politesse.

“Can I be of some help?”

“She’s just making this noise, Dad!” Buck complained.

“And it was disturbing you.”

“Yeah, sure, it would disturb
anybody—”

“Sure,” mimicked Emily, “anybody who didn’t have a place of their
own.
He can’t move out and also expect to control things in the house any time he—”

“Emily,” George reprimanded gently, “I was talking to Buck.”

He held the gaze of his teenage eldest, studied the fierce eyes in the boyish, almost beautiful face.

“However,” George added, “Emily has a point, of sorts. You are always welcome in the house at any time, you know that, but we arranged to let you establish residence in the RV so that you could have your independence and solitude there.”

“See?” said Emily.

“On the other hand,” George continued, shifting his gaze to Emily now, “the noise
was
a trifle excessive for this time of night.”

“Oh, I get it,” said Buck, “I know this game. Nobody’s right, nobody’s wrong, you’re off the hook, we go back to our corners.”

George kept himself calm. It was so easy sometimes to get sucked into the vortex of Buck’s rebelliousness. To forget, with a loved one, that anger is not met best with anger.

“It is entirely possible, Buck, and in this instance especially, that there
is
no right or wrong. I don’t see where Emily’s intentions meant to hurt you directly or indirectly. Do you?”

Buck remained silent. George continued:

“What were you doing when you felt disturbed?”

“Thinking,” Buck replied. Cryptically.

“. . . Dare I ask?”

“I don’t think you—”

Would understand,
George finished in his mind, with a father’s intuition, but Buck pulled back, leaving the thought unresolved.

“—uhh, kind of personal.”

“I see. Well, it does rather seem as if the RV would be useful for that kind of introspection. In fact, I always thought you meant to use it as a retreat for just such occasions.”

“You chasing me out?”

“Never.”

And then something, some sixth sense or
something
popped an odd question into George’s mind. After all, Buck
did
usually spend his nights, and his thinking time, in the RV. The Recreational Vehicle had originally been purchased for the family’s use, but as Buck’s need for independence had become fiercer and fiercer, it became apparent that its greatest use would be as a place for Buck to call his own: outside of the household but close enough to the family to afford him the emotional support a teenage boy would need.

“But I do wonder, and understand I am
just
wondering. Was there any particular reason you needed to do your thinking here in the house? Anything you needed our presence to—”

And George knew he’d hit a nerve because Buck utterly circumvented the question. “You
are
chasing me out, I knew it,” he announced, and then whirled on his heel and made a show of pounding down the stairs.

“Buck,” George called.

“Just forget it!” Buck shouted from the foyer, and then he was out of the house, the front door slamming behind him. George turned his bewildered gaze on Emily.

“Don’t look at
me,”
she said expansively, with an exaggerated shrug.
“I
didn’t do anything.”

George allowed himself a small smile. “Well, actually you did do
something.
What was all that jumping about?”

Emily’s expression lit up. “It’s my turn to come up with a dance exercise for the gym club in school.” And that was the moment George registered the fact that Emily was in her gymnastics outfit. “I was putting the finishing touches on it. Wanna see?”

First Susan’s sketches, now Emily’s choreography. Both his big girls, it seemed, wanted his appraisal of their creations tonight.

“Certainly,” George smiled.

She invited him into her room with a toss of her head. The floor had been cleared to give her as open a space as possible.

“You have to imagine the running start. There’s not enough room in here to do it full out.”

“I’ll do my best,” George assured her.

Starting flat against the wall, Emily took a single hop, bounded up several feet, landed,

Thump,

deep bending at the knees, arms up, uncoiling like a spring, arms at the side now, pirouetting full in midair, landing,

Thump,

kick starting a forward tumble,

de,

landing on her hands,

thump,

bending at the elbows, uncoiling again, pushing herself into the air, somersaulting backward until she was again erect and landing,

Ka-flump!

with a flourish.

Her face was beaming, radiant, flush with the enthusiasm of accomplishment, her eyes had turned from blue to brown with the exertion.

What, George wondered, was he to say?

That the coordination was lovely, but that the style lacked cohesion? That in his eyes it was less a dance routine than a youthful, slightly self-conscious, slightly self-aggrandizing display of dexterity?

His daughter’s extraordinarily pretty face was a study in twelve-year-old vulnerability.

Tell her what I truly think? The night before her presentation?

Nope, he thought. Not me.

“It’s just wonderful, Emily,” he said. And he did not lie.

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Thanks, Dad!” And he was rewarded with a bear hug, which put all the hardship of fatherhood in perspective.

He then bade her good night, advising that
some
sleep was necessary, and exited her room into the hallway, reflexively belting his robe tighter for the walk he was about to take outside.

It was a cool Los Angeles night in late September, cool even for George as he padded barefoot over the front lawn to the door of the RV. He knocked.

“Buck? Are you in there?”

There was no immediate response.

It was possible he wasn’t. It was possible he’d gone for a walk, but George hoped not. He didn’t like the idea of Buck walking around the streets this late. In a mood.

“Buck?”

Then, at length, through the door:

“Go away, Dad.”

Ah. Well. Some relief, anyway.

“I just wondered, son, if you wanted to talk. In private.”

“Not necessary, Dad.”

Father and son shared a leaden silence. George opened his mouth to break it when, from inside the RV, in a softer tone, Buck said:

“I’m okay,
okay?
I mean, I appreciate it, but I’m fine.”

George wanted something more than that, but it was clear that more would not be forthcoming, nor could he reasonably expect more without forcing the issue. And he wouldn’t force. Not without good reason. It was important these days that Buck find his own way. George only wished he knew what the hell his son was trying to find his way
through.

“All right, son,” he conceded. “Good night.”

He said the last with a little emphasis, hoping to elicit a response. But there was silence from within the RV—and from without: crickets and birds, birds and crickets. The odd sounds of cars approaching and fading in the distance. The cold, burning indifference of the stars above.

He went back into the house, suddenly very tired, wiping the soles of his feet on the inside mat, and climbing the stairs to return to his bedroom. He found Vessna asleep in her crib, Susan likewise asleep on her side of the bed. He popped quickly into the adjoining bathroom, quietly attended to that which needed attending, emerged again into the bedroom, slid between the sheets, thinking of Vessna’s voracious appetite, Susan’s tender breasts, Emily’s need to impress, Buck’s enigmatic crisis, and everybody’s desire for his approval.

He then wondered if he should bother nudging Susan gently awake to tell her how much he admired her sketches. But as he rolled over, his hand touched her side and, rather than rocking, nestled comfortably in the warm valley of her hip, and he half thought he’d remember to tell her in the morning—which, of course, he would not, it being only a half thought—and then his eyes closed and there was no clear thought anymore, half, whole, or otherwise, only the abstraction of dreams . . .