Gravity Box and Other Spaces (29 page)

When Eric was done with his grief, he started seeing other women. Eric just moved on as if no dramatic life change had ever happened, as if his wife's death had made no impact, no dent on his life at all. He was the same man,
and Paul had hated him for that. Perhaps if he had shown a change, acted differently toward life, his friends, his son, then Paul might have accepted his actions. But Eric remained the same. Through his outrage, Paul had been unable to detect a significant difference in his father from the time before his mother had died and this man who could not seem to sustain proper grief.

Perhaps not
, Paul thought now, but he would never know. By the time his anger had passed he discovered that he could not know if Eric was simply showing the world a face and keeping everything in or if he was different and Paul had not known him well enough before. Paul had been fourteen when his mother died of cancer. But he had not known about the cancer then because Eric had kept that from him. One day he noticed that his mother was sick a lot, shortly after she left to go to a clinic. A few months later came the funeral. All through that time everything possessed a surreal aura, like light shot through glycerine. People moved with effort. Grief seemed a tangible thing, moments became encased in amber, and he remembered them long afterward as still-lifes.

I'll have to wait thirty years now to ask, he thought. Maybe by then I'll be able to.

“Why are we going to Gra'pa's house?”

The question jolted Paul from his thoughts.

“We live there now, Jon,” Kay said.

“Why?”

“Grampa asked us to take care of it. It's easier to do that if we live there.”

“We're going to live there till he comes back?”

“Perhaps.” She smiled over her shoulder. “You like Grampa's house, don't you? You don't mind living there?”

Jonathan nodded, but he looked uncertain.

Paul pulled into the garage. He got out of the car and opened Kay's door. She smiled at him as he helped her out. Jonathan jumped from the rear seat and looked back down the driveway.

“Come on, Jonathan,” he called.

The boy remained motionless. Paul and Kay exchanged quizzical looks, silently asking each other if this was something important that needed attention or just Jonathan being Jonathan.

“Jon,” Kay called.

The boy turned. He looked like he had a question but did not know how to phrase it.
Perhaps
, Paul thought,
he wonders why we have to go through all this nonsense for an eccentric old man.

“Let's get some lunch, son.”

Jonathan nodded, took another look down the driveway, then followed his parents into the house.

Paul had been in his bedroom most of an hour when Kay came in. He sat on his old bed in his old room, the one he would always think of as truly his, and watched his wife move ponderously through the process of undressing. Paul was fascinated by her, especially now. Her breasts were swollen, the nipples large and dark, resting on the enormous mound of her pregnancy. Paul admired her legs.

She pulled a nightgown on, sat on the end of the bed, and brushed her hair for a few minutes.

“I thought,” she began and then shook her head.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, something. Tell me.”

She stood, set the brush on the dresser. “I thought we'd be in the main bedroom.”

“That's Eric's.”

Kay gave him a quizzical look.

“You disagree?” he pressed.

“Is it going to be his for the next thirty years? Everything?”

“It is, though.”

“Then we ought to move back to our house. I don't think I want to feel like a guest here for thirty years.”

“But we've put ours on the market.”

“No one has bought it yet; we'll just withdraw it.”

“I thought you wanted to live here.”

She nodded, eased herself into bed. “Yes, I want to live here. I don't want to just
stay
here.”

“This is Eric's house.”

“And he's given it to us.”

“No, he hasn't. He's asked us to take care of it.”

Kay studied him, eyes narrowed. She let her hand brush his arm lightly. “Hon, we can't pretend that we're just watching his home for him. In the first place he told us that it's our home if we want it. In the second place, we've got to get on with our lives and if we stay here we have to live here, otherwise we'll be putting everything on hold, waiting for your father to return.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“If he was on a European tour for six months, nothing. But three decades is a little long for us to wait for him to come back before we decide who we are.”

Paul blinked at her. “That didn't make any sense.”

“No? Okay. I'm tired. I need sleep.”

Paul watched her close her eyes. For a moment he was dismayed. Then he felt angry. How did she always manage
to stir up a lot of uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings and then have the gall to just go to sleep before anything is resolved?

They had been in counseling a few years earlier. Paul had thought little enough of it all: Nothing for him had been solved, but he remembered some of the rules the counselor laid down. Never go to bed with an argument unfinished. There had been times as a boy he had wished he had known that with Eric. He glanced around at the walls of his room. Jumbled memories of Eric sending him to bed, this bed, in the middle of an argument flooded his mind. He glared at Kay.

“You and Eric are a lot alike,” he said.

Her eyes snapped open. “I think I'm prettier.”

The joke struck him wrong, and he got out of bed.

“Hey,” she said. “That was supposed to be funny.”

“What the hell did you mean by that? Not waiting for him to come back before deciding who we are. What does that mean?”

“Ah. I struck a nerve.”

She pushed herself upright and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She sighed, stood, and pulled on a robe.

“Okay,” she said. “Let's go into the kitchen. If we're going to fight I'm going to munch.”

Paul bristled. Of all the things Eric did continually that irritated, annoyed, and enraged him, it was by far his refusal to take arguments seriously that worked Paul into inexpressible states. Mute, he followed his wife to the kitchen.

Kay pulled a vegetable platter from the refrigerator, set it on the island, and plucked a celery stick from it. Her nonchalance scraped at his patience.

“I start?” she asked. Paul folded his arms and glared at her. She nodded.

“I start. Paul, I love you. That doesn't change. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. I wouldn't be carrying our second child. I wouldn't be trying to make this work, if I didn't. But sometimes you can be the most perverse son-of-a-bitch I've ever known.”

Paul felt physically rocked. He dropped his arms and stared at her. She bit off half the celery stick.

“Eric is easy to understand,” she went on. “He's self-indulgent and egotistical.”

“I suppose you'd be happier with someone like that?”

“No. Otherwise I would have found someone like that. But when you say I'm a lot like him I'm torn about how to take it. You admire your father almost to the point of elevating him to godhood, but you use him as an example of everything you don't like in other people.”

“Oh. So you think I want to be like him.”

“I didn't say that. And no, I don't. You don't want to be like him. The trouble is you're so goddamned busy not being like him that you're not bothering to be like anything else, either.”

Paul raised his hand, finger pointed, and opened his mouth. A dozen arguments crowded his mind, demanding expression. He could not decide which was most important, so none of them was said. He turned away.

“I like your father,” Kay said. “I think he's a wonderful grandfather to Jon.”

“Jonathan,” Paul corrected automatically. He hated nicknames; his own had been Kite.

“Jon.”

He glared at her.

“He's a little boy,” she said. “Don't load all this generational guilt crap on him. He's not the standard you could never be.”

“Excuse me?”

Kay threw up a hand in disgust and rolled her eyes. “You want to live up to Eric's expectations—what you think those are, at any rate—and you don't think you can, so you'll make sure our son does. Stop it. He's his own self.”

“I know that! He's my son. I love him!”

“So love him.”

“I do! I take my responsibilities toward him very seriously!”

Kay nodded. “Unlike your father?”

“Unlike my father! Yes! Eric never takes anything seriously!”

“Especially you?”

“I don't know about ‘especially,' but he never took me seriously.”

“You're wrong.”

“Oh? This is something you know by virtue of some special insight? Eric perhaps explained this to you? That'd be like him to explain to you what he'd never think to mention to me.”

Kay raised an eyebrow. “You better watch that or you'll have a neurosis before you know it.”

Paul slammed both fists down on the counter. The vegetable platter jumped, but nothing spilled. Pain shot up his forearms. Frustration encysted him.

He looked at Kay. Her image was broken and hazy from the frustration welling in his eyes. He turned around and looked at the walls, the windows, and out at the autumn darkness.

“Why couldn't he just die like a normal human being? Why couldn't he just go away and never come back? I can't even ask him that for thirty years.”

Kay came around the island and hugged him from behind. At first he resented the gesture, wincing at the attempted comfort. His misery was his own in a way that nothing else had ever been. Still, he turned and held her.

Jonathan stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching them, his small face still and solemn. Paul frowned.

“Jonathan—?”

“Don't you want Gra'pa to come back?”

Paul stiffened. Jonathan waited for an answer, eyes liquid and hurt, confusion demanding resolution. Paul looked at Kay and she watched him, waiting.

“He asked you,” she whispered.

Paul shook his head.

Kay said no more about it, but moved them into Eric's bedroom. Paul watched, fascinated, while she reordered their lives with a quiet efficiency and confidence that in anyone else would have made him feel inadequate.

Sleeping in that bed, in Eric's bed, was difficult. Paul would lie awake for an hour before drifting off, his attention riveted to every sound that broke the night's quiet. He lay with his hands folded over his chest, his legs straight, almost rigid, and in the morning it appeared he had hardly moved at all. He did not remember his dreams.

After a few weeks he resumed work. Eric's office was equipped with a better computer system than he had and it was easy to shift all his databases and projects into the expanded system. He immersed himself in designs again.

The intricacy of architecture fascinated Paul. He lost himself in the complexities, the problem-solving, and the piece-by-piece creation of a solution. He worked best alone rather than as part of a team. He was always disturbed by what others did to his work, even when he approved the modifications.

He entered into relationships with his designs; they were part of him. Here, before his computer-augmented drafting board, amid all the programs, reference materials, and sketches, he felt himself most complete. It was completion by negation, though, for he was not conscious of “Paul” while he worked; he was the work. Kay pointed this out once, but he did not understand. He only knew he had no self-doubt when he had a project on his desk.

He looked at his progeny the same way, though he insisted the affection he held toward the one was qualitatively different from the other. He collected books and developed whole databases about fetal development, post-natal care, and early childhood progress. Kay had chided him on what appeared a heroic attempt to make himself into a pediatrician. Nevertheless, it fascinated him. Jonathan was a growing, changing, self-repairing, self-improving, adapting, living structure.