Light of Day (13 page)

He had not gone to Sally Richards's for the Fourth. He had not even called her. Today was the seventh. “It's too late now.”

He wasn't going to look through the photo albums, or the loose pictures in their yellow envelopes, he was only going to organize them, by month and year, and box them, but there was always that one photo that he had to stop and look at: Danny playing, Anne smiling, mugging for the camera. Jack experienced a perverse pleasure from the pain he was inflicting on himself, the sensation of pain becoming familiar and acceptable. He took an almost clinical approach to it, stepping back, stepping out of himself, watching himself.

“This is what it feels like when your son kills himself. This is what it's like to go mad.” He was surprised at how calm he was, as he arranged the next package of sorrow.

He used to tell Danny that memory is what makes people moral.
But memory also makes people time machines of sorts, although it never brings satisfaction. The old letters found in the shoe boxes, the photographs—these manufactured ghosts—never metamorphose into life, never do more than locate the hurt, the soft spot, like the bruise on the fruit, that starts to throb and ache before the shoe box gets unwrapped or the photograph catches the first light, before you realize what you're thinking about, the way it throbbed when Jack turned over the next picture and saw Danny's face, when he opened the next box.

He wondered what Danny would think if he saw his father sweating naked in the attic, sorting through the old photographs, talking to himself and weeping. Was this what Danny had in mind when he committed suicide? Was this what he expected?

What are the rules of behavior now? Jack wondered. What do you want me to
do
?

Did Danny expect Jack to behave the way he always behaved? Did he expect Jack to have a plan of action, a way of coping? Did he expect Jack to behave like Dr. Owens? Did he expect him to live up to the deal?

“There is no deal.” Jack sat on the floor, drew his legs up to his chest. “The deal was with the living Danny.”

There was no deal because there was nothing left to lose. That was why Jack could go through the week without showering or shaving, why he could walk through the house talking to himself, sit on the kitchen floor spoon-feeding Mutt while he neglected to feed himself; why he could sit naked in the attic, in the heat and the dust and the dirt.

He laid a handful of baby pictures at his feet. “What's left to lose? What's left to lose?” While the soft spot pulsed like a heart.

 

They were lying side by side in their bed. The gray SoHo light seemed to drip, like a slow faucet, into the loft, inching across the bare floor and along the walls. Jack was wearing the bottoms of his drawstring pajamas and drinking beer out of the bottle. Anne lifted it out of his hand and took a sip.

“I suppose I'll have to swear off this stuff,” she said, not sounding at all pleased. “It's going to take some getting used to.”

“Not drinking beer or having a baby?”

She didn't answer. She said, “So, what do you think?”

“I don't know. We're having a hell of a lot of fun and that's going to end.”

“A
hell
of a lot of fun.”

“We should be excited, don't you think?”

“I don't know what to think. I don't know what to feel. I'd like to think I'm scared to death, but I'm not sure that's what it is, either.”

“We should be more enthusiastic.”

“I like our life the way it is.” She kissed his hand. “I'm not sure I want the honeymoon to end.”

“A six-year honeymoon isn't nearly long enough.” He raised the bottle to his mouth.

“No,” she said, “it isn't.”

“It's pretty bourgeois, having a kid. Hunting around for a neighborhood with a park. Finding a good school. Buying a
house
…”

“I don't know, Jack.”

“Man, it's confusing.”

“I never thought of us as one of those couples who needed a baby to make their lives complete.”

“We're not.”

“And you know it's going to change our lives dramatically. How we sleep and the way we do our work. The way—
Every
thing.”

“We should have been more careful.”

“Should have, but weren't,” she said flatly. “I haven't called my parents yet.”

“I haven't told mine. In case we—” He didn't have to finish.

“I suppose some sort of instinct will take over after a while and we'll start nesting and designing little things for it to wear. But I'm not feeling any of that right now.”

“Neither am I.”

“I'm not sure that I'm even looking forward to feeling it,” she told Jack. “I don't know.”

Jack put his arm around her shoulder and drew her closer to him. He started kissing the back of her neck and nuzzling his face in her hair. She said that's another thing they'd even have to change after the baby
was born, their sex life.

“Not right away. After a year.”

“Sooner,” Anne told him. “They're aware of everything in six months. So, my rapacious Jack, we not only must pay the piper for our fun, we'll have to take it on the sly as well.”

Later, with the tray of Italian bread and pâté next to them, Anne said, “We don't
have
to know the answer, do we? Not right this minute.”

Two weeks later, sitting with his parents in their library, two glasses of whiskey on the coffee table, one for him, one for his father, a gin and tonic for his mother, Jack's father said,
“Bourgeois?”
his voice strong and resonant. “What do you think you are, Jackie, a struggling artist? You're a Ph.D. NYU professor with a published book under your belt.” There was nothing scolding in his voice. If anything, he sounded as though he were simply stating Jack's credentials to the department chair, and trying hard not show any bias toward the candidate. Jack looked at his mother. She winked at him while his father went on, “And harboring the illusion of a bohemian life,
if,
by the way you ever had one, even when you were in college, is no reason not to have this baby.”

His mother told him, “If either of you has any claim to the title, it's Anne. And even that's a stretch.” She ran her hand along the arm of the chair, her fingers making small circles against the rose-colored fabric. Her long torso, like a Modigliani woman, like a young dancer, bent gracefully when she reached for her drink. She lifted her cigarette from the ashtray, leaving the subtle and pleasant scent of her perfume in her wake, the same perfume which insinuated itself throughout the apartment. She inhaled the smoke, almost as an afterthought, then raised her glass and said, “To your healthy new baby.”

“Enjoy the miracle of life that's come to you,” his father said with a catch in his throat.

Jack raised his glass and sipped his whiskey. It went down smoothly, nothing second-rate about it, or anything else in the apartment. Not the crisp arrangements of sculpture, or the way a clock defined the space on a wall. Nor the elegant line of the neoclassic couch and the way it was placed symmetrically between two chairs; the lamplight, gauged just right to show off the oil paintings. The bookcase filling the west wall:
Cather and Fitzgerald first editions, some early Hemingway, Twain. Limited editions of poetry: e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Kenneth Burke, Howard Nemerov, Wallace Stevens. The plays of George S. Kaufman—with and without Hart—Miller, Odets, Shaw, Pirandello, Noël Coward, Shakespeare, Molière; rare first editions by authors dead and forgotten, some forgotten even before they were dead; contemporary books from the bestseller list sandwiched in the corners.

Jack admired his parents' apartment the way he'd admire any work of art, more than a little in awe of it—it was his mother's creation, really, his father was the silent partner in this particular operation. “Go with your strength and know when to shut up,” he would say. Interior design may be the small talk of the art world, but when it's done without apology and derivation, it can stand on its own aesthetic, or so it seemed to Jack when he sat with his parents, the evening etching a path along Park Avenue, up through the windows and across the Oriental rugs. If he knew nothing else about the people who lived here, if this were all he had to go on, he would not have doubted the substance of their hearts or the quality of their minds. If they weren't his parents, he would have envied their child.

This was not the apartment in which Jack had grown up. That apartment was on East Sixty-eighth Street, a sprawling duplex with two staircases and a long hallway, uncarpeted, he always believed, to give his parents ample time to uncouple at the sound of their son's little feet slapping the parquet floor. His bedroom was a clutter of baseballs, bats and gloves, shoulder pads and footballs, clothes and shoes. The bookcases were crammed, not with first editions, but with
Best Sports Stories
and Red Smith, Ring Lardner,
The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye,
film biographies. His bedpost, gnawed and slavered on by Louie, his black Lab, who would outlive two more beds, was draped with jerseys and baseball caps. The walls were dabbed with peanut butter fingerprints, papered with movie posters. His father had set up a small projection room in what later would be the guest room, so Jack could screen the movies he made with his 16-millimeter camera. But the apartment on Park Avenue was his parents' alone, where Jack, in spite of his mother's insistence to the contrary, was a guest, which was how he thought it
should be. A place of their own for which they'd waited sixteen years—when Jack went off to college—to have; and even if they never said it and surely never made Jack feel it, the wait must have seemed endless at times.

Jack wondered, after he raised his whiskey and joined in the toast, would he and Anne spend the next sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years waiting as their child calibrated their lives? Would they wait for him or her to leave home? Would they wait, always aware of waiting, to have a place of their own again?

Jack took another sip of his drink.

His father walked over to the window. His tall, broad body cast a long shadow against the floor. “You think your mother and I wanted
you
?” he said to Jack.

“Your father thinks he's funny,” Jack's mother said. “You're not. You're not funny, Mike. After all these years you'd think he'd admit to himself the humor gene was lost on him.” She lighted a fresh cigarette. “Please, Mike, this is no time for jokes.”

“I'm not joking. I think it's time Jackie knew the truth. We never wanted you. We still don't.”

“Believe me,” his mother said, “we wanted you.”

“It's a little late for reassurances.” Jack matched his father's dead-pan. “The damage is done.” And they all laughed, although Jack's mother reminded them that this was “no laughing matter.”

“Of course it is,” his father said. “You can't take life seriously all the time.”

“There are couples out there who'd give everything to have a baby,” Jack's mother said, “so don't take it for granted.”

“How does Anne feel about it?” his father wanted to know.

“The same way I do.”

“Everyone is scared the first time.”

“That's not it. Or maybe we're just not sure what it is we're scared of.” He swallowed the rest of his drink. “Anne and I are happy with the way things are. We don't want a baby to spoil that. To weigh us down.”

“Endless childhood?” his father asked.

“You know better than that.”

“We don't
know
better than
any
thing,” his mother said. “Opinions, however, are another story.”

“And your opinion?”

His parents exchanged fast glances, the way they used to when Jack would ask them questions about sex.

“It goes without saying,” his mother said, “that the idea of your father and me being grandparents is thrilling.” There was always a hint of amusement in her voice, as though she already knew the winner of the race, the final score, but was keeping it to herself until everyone else caught up to her. It was there now. She already knew what Jack and Anne were going to decide, even as she said, “You know my stand on abortion, but if you and Anne are considering it you should have a better reason than ‘too
bourgeois
' or else you're just playing Peter Pan to her Wendy and I don't think that's very healthy.” She snuffed out her cigarette.

“That's
it
? That's your
opinion
?”

“Isn't that enough?” his father said.

“Trust your instincts, Jackie,” his mother told him. “They'll never steer you wrong.”

“By the way, where
is
Anne?” his father asked. “I'd think she'd want to be in on this.”

“She's over on Seventy-first Street hanging her show. She'll be here later.”

“An Upper East Side gallery.” His mother smiled. “
Very
bohemian.”

 

Jack held the tiny red sweater in his hand and the white baby shoes, then gently placed them in the carton. He looked through another set of photographs: Danny's summer in France. And another: the summer in Tuscany.

He wiped the sweat off his face and worked on the next set of pictures, slowly. There was no reason to hurry. Methodically. There was no reason not to be thorough.

He sorted through the photographs of his mother and father. There were even a few photographs of Maggie—
Not your finest hour, Jack
—
and he thought for a moment about Maggie Brighton, who taught English lit in Bloomington, and played piano duets with Danny on Sunday afternoons. Then Jack quickly pulled out more pictures of Danny with Anne, Anne sitting by herself on a bench in Central Park, on vacation in Dorset.