Blind Sight (11 page)

Sara wasn’t exactly thrilled that the girls were having a
Mountjoy Girls
revival. We had a conversation about it, in the kitchen, where I was helping prepare the tofurkey.

“It’s nice for Mother,” Sara said, “to see the girls reading her books and enjoying them so much.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Of course, I could probably quote the whole series to them, if I wanted to,” Sara said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah.”

“ ‘
Sally pinned her hat so that the brim covered one eye,
’ ” Sara quoted. “ ‘
She felt this gave her an air of mystery, an air somewhat at odds with her eager smile, which Sally could never quite remember to suppress.
’ ”

“That sounds like Sally,” I agreed.

“For mother, the Mountjoy Girls were the paradigm of the childhood experience. She wanted us to have all those same experiences. She wanted to create a world for us that didn’t exist anymore, and she wasn’t prepared to accept that it didn’t. And you know, we just couldn’t be Mountjoy Girls, or live Mountjoy Girl lives.”

“Well, no,” I said. “For one thing, in the beginning they are still mostly riding around in horse and buggies.”

“It didn’t help that she all but named us after her own fictional characters,” Sara continued. “It was like there was a blueprint already made for us. That’s why I’ve been careful to give all of you room to be yourselves,” Sara said. “Not put expectations on you.”

I reassured her that we all felt very free to discover ourselves, without a blueprint, but come on. At the very least, there is a twelve-generation ghost posse of three sisters hanging around, wondering why I’m here. That’s one of the reasons I never liked Nana’s books. I’ve got enough women around without adding the Mountjoy sisters.

I mean, seriously, even the dog we had was female. It was Nana’s dog, Freida, a totally nervous cocker spaniel. She spent most of her time underneath things. When she died, Nana said she was with her Maker, and Sara said she might be reincarnating into a new animal and I was like, “Yeah, probably a mole.” No, I didn’t say that, of course.

I always wanted a dog of my own.

I think I should do my walk-through now.

• • •

Luke moves away from his desk—flees from it, really—and steps lightly down the hallway.

“Well, that’s what really drew me to James, as a character,” Mark is saying. “He has a lot of demons, but he’s been taught to hide those, to wear this mask of control. What’s interesting about James, about anybody really, is what’s underneath the mask.”

Luke takes the last few steps that lead around to the living room.

“Hey there,” Mark calls out.

Mark is sprawled in one of the dark leather chairs. The interviewer, an older woman wearing a good deal of makeup and jewelry, sits on the couch, one plump leg crossed over the other, knees angled toward Mark; a large yellow notebook nestled in her lap. As Luke gets closer, he notices a recording device on the coffee table in between two glasses of iced green tea. The woman’s glass is almost empty.

“This is Angela Hewson,” Mark says. “Angela, this is my son, Luke.”

Angela gives Luke her fingers to shake, as if Luke might not know how to deal with her entire hand. Bits of lipstick are missing from her lips. Luke can feel Angela’s eyes raking him over.

“It’s nice to meet you,” Angela says. “You’re about to start senior year of high school, right? And you’re already working on your college applications? That’s pretty impressive.”

“Oh, well … I’m not working that hard, actually,” Luke says.

“Luke is a very disciplined guy,” Mark says. “Self-disciplined.”

“So where are you going?” Angela asks, leaning forward to take up her iced tea glass.

“Oh, I’m just going to the kitchen,” Luke explains.

Angela laughs again.

“Okay!” she says. “I meant where did you want to go for college, but that works too.”

Luke thinks Angela can hardly be a crack journalist if she asks vague questions like, “Where do you want to go?” out of the blue
in this fashion and expects that he will know in what context she means.

“UCLA,” says Mark. “Right, Luke? So I can be an overprotective annoying dad for a couple of years?”

“Definitely UCLA,” Luke says. “That way, I have somewhere to bring my laundry.”

Everybody laughs at this. Luke wonders if his voice is making it onto the recording device.

“I’m going to get a soda. May I get you another iced tea, Mrs. Hewson?”

Luke is careful to say “may” instead of “can” and to speak in a polite tone. He would like to be helpful to Mark, and show what a well-brought-up young man he is. Luke can tell from Angela’s response that his strategy has worked. Mark makes a funny face at Luke and coasting on this, Luke sails into the kitchen, where he finds Kati putting together a plate of fruit and cheese. Kati mouths, “Hey,” silently at him. As he opens the refrigerator door, Luke overhears Angela saying,

“Okay, so you must have had Luke when you were a teenager yourself?”

“Yeah, I was young. Not much older than Luke is now.”

“How often do you get to see him?”

Luke pauses, one hand on the refrigerator door. He turns and looks at Kati, who has paused in her cheese arranging and is clearly listening too. Kati and Luke look at each other.

“Not as much as I would like,” Mark says.

“Good one, Dad,” Luke thinks. Kati smiles. Luke pulls a bottle of lemon ginger juice and the pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator.

“It’s clear you are really proud of him,” Angela says.

“He’s a fantastic kid. Way smarter and pulled together than I was at his age.”

Luke refills Angela’s iced tea, and wonders if he should wipe the lipstick smudges off the rim of her glass. This is the first time Luke has heard his father refer, even vaguely, to himself as a young person.
Luke knows that Mark was born in Illinois, that his parents divorced when he was four, and that his mother, Julia, raised him. He knows Mark attended Grover High School, where he played football and was a member of the Grover High Spotlight Players. After graduating high school Mark moved to New York City to study acting professionally. Luke knows these things from the biographical section of Mark Franco’s listing in the Internet Movie Database, not from anything Mark has said to Luke.

Luke hears Angela ask, “So what were you like at his age?”

Luke takes his time putting the juice back because he would very much like to hear the answer to this question.

There is a longish pause and then the sound of Mark’s voice saying, “Angry.”

“Angry at what?”

There is another long pause. Luke pretends to examine the contents of the refrigerator because he can feel Kati watching him. Mark laughs.

“Oh, all teenagers are angry, right?” Mark asks, lightly.

Luke prepares for his second pass. He mimes taking the cheese tray in for Kati, who shakes her head and waves him off. On the way back through the living room, Luke tells Angela that it was nice to meet her. Walking down the hallway, he hears her say, “I’d like to get back to this idea of masks …”

In another hour, the interviewer and Kati have left. Mark comes to Luke’s room, and flops down on his bed.

“Jesus, God, that was excruciating,” he groans. “I’m fucking exhausted.”

“It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” Luke asks. “Being recorded like that? I guess you get used to it?”

“I’m bad at it,” Mark says. “It’s impossible to say anything that doesn’t sound like … I don’t know … like, ‘Listen to these thoughts I have! They’re so interesting! Wait! Write this down!’ But she’s a Golden Globe voter so I had to do it.”

“I thought you sounded good,” Luke offers. “What I heard of it.”

“Oh yeah? Maybe I was okay. But, you!” Mark laughs. “ ‘May I get you another iced tea, Mrs. Hewson?’ ” he says, in an ultra-suave version of Luke’s voice.

“Hey, good job on answering the ‘How often do you see him?’ question,” Luke tells him.

“Oh,” Mark says. “Um, okay. Hmm.”

“I heard it from the kitchen.” It wasn’t really eavesdropping, Luke thinks, since Mark was being recorded, and was speaking publicly, as it were.

“No, no,” Mark says. “Of course. I’m just not sure what you mean, I guess. What do you mean?”

“I mean it’s nobody’s business but ours, right?” Luke says. “We don’t have to tell people the whole story. You were being interviewed for a magazine; of course you have to be careful what you say. I mean, you can get into a whole argument about moral relativism …”

Luke stops talking because he thinks he is starting to sound like he really does mean something else. And that maybe he was eavesdropping, since he wasn’t the one asking the questions.

“I don’t know about moral relativism,” Mark says. “But now I feel like a dick. I didn’t mean to pass myself off like some kind of … like I’m this great dad and I’ve always been there for you.” Mark looks upset, with himself or Luke, Luke doesn’t know, just as Mark doesn’t know how eager Luke is to embrace a three-sentence explanation of his father’s seventeen-year absence.

“Technically you always were there,” Luke says. “You’re half of me. The rest is just … shared experience, really. And we’re doing that now, right?”

“Well, hey, that’s solved, then.” Mark swings himself off Luke’s bed. “Thanks for letting me off the hook of any responsibility. What a relief.”

Luke has heard his father be sarcastic about things, and people, but this is the first time that he’s felt himself to be the object of Mark’s
sarcasm. Luke does not know what to do, or say, next. People do not usually require Luke to be
less
understanding.

“Well, I can’t act mad at you if I’m not really mad at you,” Luke tells him. “I’m not an actor.”

Mark sits down on the bed again.

“You can be mad at me if you want to,” he says.

Luke wonders if this is like when Pearl wants you to be mad at her, so she can unload whatever monologue she’s been devising in her head. You have to throw the first punch, so she has proper justification. But with Pearl, Luke more or less knows what’s coming, how long it will stay, and what the aftermath will look like. Luke doesn’t know Mark well enough to know what he’s going to do. He could walk away entirely, disappear behind glass doors that make a sucking air sound when you pull them apart.

“My dad split when I was little,” Mark says. “I wasn’t mad at him, for bailing. I never knew him. My mom didn’t have anything good to say about him. There’s been times that I’ve been grateful, I didn’t have to … it’s complicated.”

Mark’s face looks sad.

Luke waits.

“I want us to be honest with each other,” Mark says, after a moment. “I think that mostly means that I want to be honest with you.”

“Yeah, let’s do that,” Luke agrees.

“I would like to say that you are a really amazing kid, apart from the fact that you are … that you’re my son. I’m really glad I’m getting to know you.”

“Thanks,” Luke says. “I feel the same way about you.”

Of course, Luke can’t be sure that how he feels about Mark is how Mark feels about him. Luke is reminded of a philosophical thought experiment: if six people are each holding a box, and can only see inside their own box, and they are all asked, “What’s in your box?” and they all say, “A beetle,” it doesn’t follow that they are all seeing the
same thing. Because what one person may call a “beetle” may be what another person would call an “apple.” Even if everybody speaks the same language they can still be talking about different things.

Luke makes the upside-down smile at his father, who makes it back at him.

“Wanna go see a game tomorrow?” Mark asks, reaching into his back pocket and producing a small white envelope, “Dodgers? Me and you?”

“Seriously?”

“I’m not a huge baseball fan. But one of the show’s producers gave me these, and it seems like a classic father/son opportunity.”

“That’s awesome, Dad. Yeah.”

“How ’bout we stay in tonight and watch some movies, play some Scrabble. I had Kati pick up that Japanese film you were talking about. Or you want to go out? We can go out, too.”

“Let’s stay in,” Luke says. “That sounds cool.”

The next day Mark takes Luke to Dodger Stadium. Luke has never been to a professional baseball game. It is exciting being there, with his father, in a special section called “The Dugout Club.” Luke feels dazed and almost guilty by the sense of privilege and status their seats convey. They sit closer to home plate than the pitcher, close enough to hear the players swearing and talking to each other, close enough to hear the sound of disturbed air in the wake of a flying baseball. So many people want to say hello to his father, or take his picture, that Luke wishes that Kati were with them to be reassured that his father gets a lot of attention and has heat. In between cheering their heads off for the Dodgers, or thinking up what archaic abuse to hurl at the Mariners (“Scurvy curs! Lecherous knaves!”) Mark turns to Luke and says, “I meant it. I think it’d be great if you went to college out here. If you want,” and Luke says, “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that too, I’m going to look into UCLA. Maybe even Caltech.”

Luke does not want his father to feel guilty about him. This is not altruism on Luke’s part. Luke does not want any potential feeling his
father might have for him to be contaminated by guilt. He wants for his father and himself to look into separate boxes and see exactly the same thing. He does not frame these wants into sentences. Instead, he tells himself that if he gets into Caltech, or UCLA, then maybe he will live with his father for a year or two. And maybe they can get a dog together. If Mark likes dogs.

M
y dad gave me an iPod yesterday. It comes in different colors, but my dad chose the black one, which is what I would have chosen for myself. This was a real gift, too, from him, because there weren’t any iPods in the garage. I checked.

My dad doesn’t make a ceremony out of giving things. He just does it. With the iPod, he pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to me, saying, “Oh, you could use one of these, right? These are good for working out.” He gets embarrassed if you thank him too much, so instead I will just make sure he sees how much I am using and enjoying it. I liked having it at the gym, but I don’t think I’ll take it for running in the canyon.