At the Bottom of Everything (6 page)

Thomas’s mom, Sally, sometimes asked polite questions about what it was like having a mom who was a pharmacist (“She must be just wonderful when you have the flu”), but I knew that they could never be friends, that they could never even really have a conversation, and I knew that Sally knew it too. She practiced some sort of law that was the opposite of my stepdad’s; she was always talking about fraud and city agencies
and the lobbyists who actually wrote our legislation. She carried binders and tote bags. She might have been the only mom I knew with undyed gray hair. She’d taken to calling out both Thomas’s and my names as soon as she walked in the door. “Well, don’t you two look comfortable!” Her accent (she was from Georgia) made everything she said sound as if she were curtsying. “I was thinking about steak tonight—sound all right by you two?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Adam, you check with your folks?”

“They don’t mind!”

“Why not go ahead and give ’em a call, just to be sure.”

“OK!”

I’d never been around an adult who seemed actually to like me; not to love me, in the smothering and depressing and animal way my mom did, and not to feign interest in me, in the professional, blank-eyed way my teachers did, but actually to want to sit down and hear what I had to say about something. Sally would pour herself a glass of white wine and, while Thomas sat at his computer in the other room, say to me, “So, did they let y’all out to watch the verdict? Everyone in my office was gathered around a portable TV like it was a campfire.” Or she might ask me what I thought about the idea of seventy-minute periods, which the high school had just decided to try out. I had no practice in sitting at a table and coming up with opinions; it felt like learning to sing.

“Mom?” Thomas would call out without looking away from the computer. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, we’re just gossiping in here.” And then sometimes she’d say (I loved to hear this the way a cat loves having its back stroked), “Adam, I just love to talk to you. If Thomas was in charge I think I’d just slide his meals under the door and come get him when Richard gets home.”

A lot of Sally’s liking me, I knew, had to do with my influence on Thomas; she was happier to see him finally with a best friend than he was. Even the parents of a boy like Thomas,
parents who are confident that their son will one day in the not too distant future write books and invent cures and design cathedrals, even they’re secretly worried that he spends too much time alone. And of course Thomas did, pre-me, spend huge amounts of time alone. At his computer he’d stare into games that seemed to consist of geometric figures shooting each other, pyramids sliding toward rectangles, beeping. He read for hours at a sitting. Never once do I remember him putting music on just to have it on; it would have been as weird as if he’d one day put on a Santa hat.

But I’m putting off describing Thomas’s dad, Richard. I have a sense, like someone trying to describe Michelangelo’s
David
, that I won’t be able to get any of the important parts of him onto the page. This would sound strange, maybe even crazy, to someone who was just meeting him for the first time; all you’d see would be a not particularly tall, ordinarily handsome, suburban D.C. dad in his forties, proud of his posture, serious about his handshake. But he had, if you stood close to him, a shimmer that certain people have, a kind of celebrity extra-reality, as if he existed both where you were with him and in movies or on newsclips. When I read
The Odyssey
, that first year of high school, it was Richard I always imagined as Odysseus—and I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Thomas told me that he was doing the same thing.

Richard wore jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Later, when I was in my early twenties, I realized that the style I was going for, the look I had whenever I most approved of what I saw in the mirror, was Richard’s. He had a pink bald head and close-set, Doberman-ish eyes. He was as thin as Thomas, but he was athletic—he was the only dad I knew who worked out, though his working out actually wasn’t anything like what we (or people slightly older than us) did. He ran; every morning you could find him out before sunrise, floating along the edge of Connecticut, wearing weightless clothes and white Reeboks battered brown. He also rowed, alone, out on the Potomac. Until seeing him I hadn’t
known that this was a sport, but there he was on this boat that looked, with his oars going and himself sliding up and down, up and down, like some sort of floating insect. Racing into a V of ripples, disappearing under bridges, while Thomas and I walked alongside onshore. At home he did chin-ups on the bar between the kitchen and the front hall, what seemed to me countless at the time but really couldn’t have been any more than, what, twenty? I imagined that he would have been capable of tearing up railroad ties or punching through doors. In one of my most vivid memories of him, Thomas is hanging from his legs and Richard isn’t slowed down in the least; you’d only know he was having to do any extra work at all by the slight smile that joined his usual workout expression.

Even at twelve, thirteen years old I understood: I wanted him to be my father. And he was, to an extent that couldn’t possibly have delighted me more, up for the job. He was a teacher. Not just literally (he taught about the Civil War at Georgetown) but in terms of temperament, inclinations. He knew things. He attracted disciples. I couldn’t talk to him for five minutes without learning some astonishing thing, some way of thinking, that I wouldn’t be able to wait to misquote as my own.

For instance:

“The early Christians, the people who were coming up with this stuff, they weren’t going to movies, they weren’t living in cities. They were farmers. Farmers of what in particular? Grapes. And you’ve probably never seen grapes grow, but the plant is this hideous, gnarly thing, like a hand with arthritis. And the grapes come up, and then they vanish. Just leaving the hand again. And then back they come the next season. And so what did these people, watching the holy life—because a crop to a farmer is holy—birth and death, birth and death, come up with? Resurrection. Reembodiment. Lazarus. Christ was a crop. He has risen.”

Or:

“So there’s impression, the buzz of sensory data, and the
mind says,
Sir, yes, sir
, and constructs a world, a story, fits it all together, hides the circuitry. Which people think ends as a dorm room chew toy: is my green your green, OK, boring, got it. But now neuroscience is saying, What if the you who thinks he gets it is a story too? What if ‘you’ are just the face your mind makes out of the disconnected dots? Have you ever seen a Chuck Close?”

After dinner, once Sally had gone back into the living room, I would sit at the table with Thomas and Richard, silently sucking on what I had to say, what I’d been planning to say for the past ten minutes, wondering whether it would, in some way I couldn’t forecast, reveal me as not having understood what they were talking about.

But when I’d finally hold my breath and come out with it—my question about why, if Catholics believed so much in the life of the fetus, they didn’t hold funerals for miscarriages, or my idea about how the American colonists could have rationalized what they did to the Indians—Richard would, almost without fail, respond in such a way as to convince me, for as long as we were talking, that I was every bit as smart as Thomas, that my brain too was a rare burden. “ ‘Ignorance is not an excuse.’ That’s very, very good. Wow. I may have to use that.”

Sally sometimes sang in the other room, and Richard would stop talking to listen, and close his eyes, as if he were about to sneeze. One night, alarmingly, he said, “
Jesus
, I love that woman.”

“I think my parents have a lot of sex,” Thomas said once when we were walking along the bike path. “Like a
lot
.”

I didn’t understand at the time that this was a kind of bragging, or if I did understand, it didn’t bother me, because I felt that the glow of it included me. “Adam,” Sally said one night, “pretty soon we’re going to get so we’re just going to fill out adoption papers for you. Your mom and I may just have a tug-of-war.”

Anna and I met again that Friday afternoon, while Nicholas and Teddy were over at friends’ houses (she answered the door in a blue silk kimono). On Sunday when they were with their father. The next Wednesday during music lessons. We were like teenagers.

We had sex against doors and on closet floors and in not-yet-entirely-warm baths. We were nearly caught by the UPS man. We took turns in the shower. She claimed to be dazzled by my young mannish stamina, which made me feel, for the first time in at least a year, as if I might actually still be young.

“What year were you born?” she said.

“Eighty-two.”

“Wow. OK.”

“You?”

“Sixty-nine. I know women are supposed to lie or something, but I don’t really care. I’m kind of proud of it.”

One afternoon she said, “You know, I think Peter was always jealous of you. I’m serious! I don’t think he liked having a younger guy around.”

She did turn out to have a streak of craziness (she flipped straight to the horoscopes, she didn’t believe in flu shots) but
she also had a streak of hardness, the kind of personality that settlers have, women who till fields with guns strapped to their backs.

She’d grown up in Vermont with just her mother, a school librarian, and three older brothers. She’d never had female friends, because they made her feel feral, with their creams and polishes. Instead she had boyfriends: she was the girl who’d let you practice taking off her bra, who’d explain how to know if a girl was faking. She’d gone to Johns Hopkins for college and then spent a couple of years trying to become a children’s book illustrator (she showed me some of her old notebooks, and her drawings were better than I’d feared; cats somehow given personalities in three strokes, trees with old men’s faces in their bark).

She’d met Peter through a friend at a fancy firm (he was an associate, five years older) and they’d only dated for nine months before he proposed; he seemed so serious and hopeful, she didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying no. She said that while she walked down the aisle, literally as she was holding her bouquet, trying not to stumble in her heels, she was thinking,
This is a mistake, this is a mistake
. She got pregnant with Nicholas just over a year later.

“This isn’t the first one of these for you, is it?” I said.

She pursed her lips. “No. Is that a problem?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Tell me if you start thinking you might get hurt,” she said. “I feel like I’m responsible for you. We’re all happiness all the time, OK?”

I didn’t think I’d get hurt (though I also couldn’t really see how this would end well). Mostly I didn’t think about it at all. Instead I kept tutoring Nicholas and Teddy—often on the same nights that I slept with their mother—and while I was with them Nicholas would say, “My mom said I can get an Xbox for my birthday,” and the woman I thought of when he said this wouldn’t be the same at all as the one who’d been clawing at my neck a few hours earlier.

Bit by bit I learned about the men before me, probably more than I should have. There was Andrew, the polite, nervous father of a boy in Teddy’s class, who had eventually asked her to run away with him. And Max, the dumb, handsome guy who worked at the coffee shop in Tenleytown, who performed freestyle rap. Was there really this entire world of affairs bubbling away? Was that the great secret business of adulthood, the way alcohol and parties were the secret business of adolescence?

I kept my resolution about not telling anyone, almost. It was March before I told Joel (by then he’d seen a condom in my bag) and he said, “Are you serious? You’re serious?! Holy shit. Ho-ly shit. Are her pubes gray? Wait, why are you wearing condoms?” That night at a bar he made a toast “to Anna, the cougar who brought my friend back to life,” and the strangers next to us roared and clinked our glasses.

I did imagine, periodically, telling Claire about her, and a couple of times I even started typing an email (leaving the
“To:”
line blank, in case I sneezed or some craziness overtook me).

I stopped myself and deleted it unsent, but I really was feeling better than I’d thought I would. Sleazy, yes, guilty and jumbled and occasionally in a kind of panic, but also awake; I had enough energy now to go for runs along K Street some mornings (there were still, somehow, patches of gray snow on most of the curbs), and my appetite was back, even if it pushed me mostly in the direction of eating chocolate chips and Saltines while standing at the kitchen counter in my gym shorts.

Not since first discovering masturbation had I overused myself quite like I did with Anna in those months. I felt like a wrung-out washcloth. It was as if we were conducting some sort of experiment, as if we’d been sent to keep each other from ever getting anything done. I hadn’t thought about law school in I didn’t know how long. I hadn’t done laundry in so many weeks that I had to take socks and underwear from Joel’s dresser. I would have said that I wasn’t much of a tutor before, but now I’d go through whole appointments without opening my mouth to do more than yawn.