Reservation Road (11 page)

Dwight

The ball game was on the radio. Sam and I listened to it as we stood on the lawn playing catch—Sam in his cutoffs and white T and me the old man in ancient semi-athletic gear: knee-length Bermudas and a U Conn sweatshirt with the sleeves hacked off at the shoulder (the Spartacus of the senior league). The sound of the ball hitting our mitts was constant but different each time. It was music, more complicated than you might have thought, and more pleasurable too.

I threw the ball and Sam caught it a little south of the webbing, pretty much dead center, and the ball went
smack!
against the oiled leather and his palm, calling back in some unexpected way my growing up, raising those years between us in the warm summer air, leather and sweat and the smacking sound of my fists hitting the bags in the gym at school, long ago. “Ouch!” I said, trying at the last second to make it sound comical.

“Ouch!” Sam yelled back, imitating me, and then he laughed a happy laugh, yanking his hand out of the mitt and shaking it as if it was on fire, which made me laugh, too. We were not bad clowns after all, the two of us.

“I thought you were supposed to be a tough kid,” I said, smiling.

“I
am
tough!”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“I’m tougher than you, Dad! Why’d you say ouch?”

“Empathy,” I said. “Now toss me the ball, sport.”

But he wasn’t ready to throw the ball just yet. “What’s ‘empathy’?”

“ ‘Empathy’ is a word that means . . .” I paused to consider. “I don’t know, I guess you could say it means I’m thinking about you. That’s all. Thinking so hard about what I think you’re feeling that I start to feel it too.”

Sam didn’t say anything. The look on his face said he was working through my explanation and possibly growing skeptical of it.

“Your hand doesn’t hurt,” he said finally. A declaration of fact. He threw the ball and I caught it.

“You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t.” I wound up and threw the ball back to him—easy, but not so soft as to take the luster off his pride. This time he caught it in the webbing like a little pro. “It’s complicated.”

“How?”

“Well, in this case I guess you could say empathy’s got more to do with what I feel in my heart than what you feel in your hand.”

Sam plucked the ball from his mitt and studied it. He checked out the grass stains and the nicks. There was a seriousness of intent in his face, a decency of spirit, that I prized in him above all other things.

“You mean your heart hurts?”

“If I think yours does.”

“You should shake it,” he said. “It helps the pain go away.”

“You’re right. I should.”

“You told me that, Dad. Remember?”

“I remember, Sam.”

He threw me the ball then, and I caught it.

He said he wanted hot dogs for dinner. Ball Park Franks were his favorite. I kept them in the freezer just for his visits. On occasion he liked to chant the old Ball Park radio jingle, “They plump when you cook ’em.” I took a package out now and set it on the kitchen counter, hard as a brick, and reached into the drawer beneath the electric oven and pulled out the nonstick fry pan Donna had given me for Father’s Day. A Tony Bennett song was playing on the radio—it was five o’clock, and the Sox game was over and so was the postgame show—and as I opened the package of hot dogs I whistled along as best I could with the music and the singing. Thinking there was just time enough to have a few dogs and some Sprite and then I’d drive him over to Ruth’s and it would be the end of a good day. I switched the burner on.

“Aren’t we gonna cook outside?” Sam was sitting on one of the high stools at the pale blue Formica counter, drinking a can of Sprite, his feet dangling almost a yard off the ground.

“No,” I said.

“I thought we were gonna cook outside.”

“We don’t have time. I’ve got to get you back to your mother’s by seven.”

“It tastes better outside,” Sam said.

“You’re right, it does. And we still don’t have time.”

“And it’s funner.”

“ ‘More fun.’ ”

“More fun,” Sam said. “It is.”

“Depends for who. I’m the cook and it’s not more fun for me. It’s more work. I’ve got to go get the grill out—”

“Last time you promised we could.”

“No,” I said. “Not last time.”

“The time before.”

“Maybe I did. I don’t remember.”

“You did. You promised.”

“Okay. I did. We still don’t have time.”

“I really want to,” Sam said.

“No, Sam.”

“Please.”

“You’re not whining, are you? Convince me you’re not whining.”

“I’m not whining.”

“Good.”

“Dad?”

“What, Sam?”

“Look at the stove.”

I looked at the stove. The pan was dry as bone and a thick cloud of black smoke was rising up out of it. “Fuck!” I said. I switched off the burner and grabbed a dish towel and chucked the still smoking pan into the sink, where, with the addition of a little water, it sizzled and popped and finally lay dead.

I turned around to find Sam laughing gleefully and imitating me.

“Fuck!” he said, just the way I had.

I glared at him and he stopped laughing. “You think that’s funny?”

“Sort of.”

I smiled a little. “You’re right. It’s sort of funny.”

Sam was getting down off the high stool. “So’re we gonna cook outside?”

“Looks like it.”

“Can I get the grill?” He was full of beans now, standing by the counter, his hands fiddling with the lid of the cigar box that held my keys and junk and change.

“Okay.”

I spoke without thinking. Before I knew it, he’d grabbed the spare garage-door opener out of the cigar box and pressed the rectangular white button; then, just as I realized what was happening, he went running out of the kitchen.

I shouted his name, shouted for him to wait. Maybe he didn’t hear. Maybe he heard and was simply too revved up to stop. The screen door banged shut and out the window I saw him tearing across the lawn toward the garage. I felt something pop in my veins. In seconds I was out of the kitchen and through the front door onto the lawn, running flat out. I saw him ahead, already closing in on the garage, and beyond him the pale light spilling out of the open carport onto the dark tar drive, mingling almost invisibly with the late-afternoon light. I was gaining on him. He wasn’t running very fast. He could have been anybody. There was the white Corsica sitting in the drive, pointing its nose at my own car now exposed to the road but still hidden from him and me. I shouted his name again and he looked over his shoulder and saw me chasing, but just laughed and kept on running—it was a game of some kind, a race, and he hoped to win it. I put my head down and ran harder. Any moment the taillights of the Taurus would come into view and he’d see it parked there and want to know why. I ran as if my life depended on it, and when he was just in front of me I reached out and grabbed a fistful of the back of his T-shirt and threw him hard to the ground.

He tumbled once, twice—it was slow motion to me. First the look of astonishment on his face: it had been a game, a race. Then astonishment evaporated and pain was his universe. It wasn’t just physical. One and a half somersaults and he was lying on his back in the grass, the wind knocked clear out of him, his head not ten feet from the driveway. For a moment he stared straight up at the sky (the sky had never lied to him). The tears were starting; everything he believed in was not that way. The old man could not be trusted. Again. There was just my meaty face leaning down over him, my big-knuckled hands held out like clothes hanging on a line to dry, my mouth so full of “sorry”s and the word “forgive.” Sorry old man. Then there were just two choices left to him—either curl up in a ball or run away. Sam ran away. While I stood flatfooted on the lawn and watched him disappear into the house.

On the drive back to Ruth’s he sat all the way against the door, as far from me as he could. I spoke to him but he wouldn’t speak back. He wouldn’t look at me. He’d stopped crying before we left my house. It was just his body I had in my car, not any of the stuff that made him who he was. I might have been delivering a package.

I kept talking. I don’t know what I said besides “sorry.” My hands were shaky on the steering wheel and my thoughts erratic. I recalled that in some Islamic countries thieves are punished by having their hands chopped off. We passed a two-pump gas station that was closed for business, and I saw myself losing my hands one by one, then my feet. I saw myself losing my tongue, and it was not as terrible as you might think. There was all manner of relief for the crooked and the bad, I imagined, but I did not say this to my son, sitting with his head practically hanging out the open window so as not to have to look at me.

We were getting near Bow Mills. Train tracks ran along the western edge of town. The trains were freight luggers and they ran at odd hours day and night. I looked ahead to where the tracks crossed the road like stitches binding a wound, and remembered the sound of the train passing in the middle of the night, the haunting call of its whistle, how I used to wake to find Ruth already sitting up in bed beside me. I remembered Sam rushing into the room in his pajamas, four years old and climbing into bed with us. Then the house so quiet after the train had gone through, the ghost of the whistle like just a fragment of some dream, and Sam wedged in between us like a pillow, the three of us wide awake and listening. Now as we came to the tracks the red warning arms started to swing and flash, and the bell began clanging and the guardrail swung down. I stopped the car and turned off the gas.

“Train,” I said.

Sam said nothing and kept his face right where it was, looking due south out his window. Like that, he’d only be able see the train after it passed.

“You’ll miss it,” I said to the back of his head.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

The train was coming slowly, just an engine and a few boxcars. The growing density of sound and the earth rumbling under our tires; like a surge of current looking for some place to go, I felt the urge to drive the car onto the tracks. But I did nothing.

“I can’t apologize again, Sam. Saying how sorry I am a hundred times doesn’t make it mean any more. It just makes it cheaper.”

“I hate you,” Sam said.

My head fell back—as if he’d placed his thumb between my eyes and pushed. The train came down on us like a tight fist of storm, roiling the air and entering the heart. Sam put his hands over his ears. He kept them there till the train had passed and the warning had stopped and the guardrail was raised; kept them there, in fact, until he was home and safe again with his mother. At which point he left me without a word.

Ethan

I had to get out of that house.

I showered, shaved. I left the house quietly, no see-you-laters, with two spots of toilet paper stuck to my neck, pinked with blood. Slamming the car door, turning on the engine, I thought how Grace must be listening. How she would have turned to look out her studio windows, which, on purpose, faced away from the road. How the whole point of those windows was to protect her from other people—people, perhaps, like me—the cars coming in, the cars going out. How her room was green and it was cool and it was private and it was hers.

I drove in the only direction that occurred to me; west on 44, then north on 7. Half an hour away, Smithfield College sat nestled between two hills above the town of Great Barrington. It was small and liberal and pretty, and I’d been teaching there for twelve years. I could have driven to it in my sleep. I climbed the hill, rising through leafy green trees, past houses white and gray and brown. A black dog stood at the edge of the road, barking. Then the houses fell back and the trees fell away and the brow of the hill stood clear and green. I passed the entrance sign that declared, “Smithfield College, Founded 1902,” and the man-made lake, the eight tennis courts and the playing field, still patchy from the end of lacrosse season. The sun was low, turning a faint orange. A pack of cross-country runners appeared up ahead, bunched like Canada geese. I passed them. The road sloped down the hill and to the right, into a hollow where, for a time, it evened out. The air smelled of pine needles. I passed the red-brick freshman dorms and the Greek Revival dining hall, and the log-cabin student union donated by some alum who’d gotten rich selling mail-order home kits in the Pacific Northwest. My car climbed the second, twin hill and went past the sweet yellow-painted Colonial that housed the registrar and the president’s office, and then the tiny white music building with the stained-glass windows in the shape of Arthurian shields that had always felt to me like a holy place in miniature, a divine closet, where more than once Josh had practiced his violin while I graded papers. I parked in the lot behind the red-brick English Department building, adjacent to the heavy-stoned Richardsonian library with the crimson roof, which contained forty-six thousand volumes, two of them by me. There was one other car in the lot, a red Jeep that belonged to an assistant English professor named Jean Olsen. I got out and walked inside.

The lights were off and I left them that way. Downstairs, the student lounge was empty. The low-slung furniture with the rough orange fabric—endemic to such places—seemed to glow in the dusky natural light, as did the posters taped to the walls: Literary Ireland; the Tower of London and the Beefeaters; Barnes and Noble’s take on Oscar Wilde, right beside James Michener. At the far end of the room a coffeemaker lay disassembled on a long folding table, like a bomb waiting to be put together.

My footsteps echoing on the linoleum, I went up the stairs to the second floor, into the empty faculty lounge, where the furniture was the same as below but the posters were better and the rows of wooden mail holes looked like a Chinese puzzle. A vending machine hummed and knocked. All down the long hall the doors were closed except for one at the end, where a wedge of light spilled out, breaking into the otherwise unrelieved dimness, and from which I could hear the rapid clicking of fingers on a computer keyboard. I remembered Jean Olsen’s Jeep downstairs, and the book-length study of R. P. Blackmur she was writing, and her desperate, decent hope for tenure, and I felt nothing and wished she’d never left her house. My office was three down from hers and I moved quietly. I had the door unlocked and shut behind me, the light on, before I felt the pressure drop and the solitude take hold; the solitude I needed. I’d made it undetected. Everything was the way I’d left it. The window was closed. The six-week-old air was crammed with dust, and the dust entered my nostrils and mouth, it was on my tongue, tasting of death, it was thick on the surface of my desk, on the spines of my books, on the framed pictures of my wife and children.

Sound and movement from the bottom of the ocean: I blinked and raised my head off my arms. The door was open, a person standing in the shadows. A woman. Jean Olsen. I was still hunched over my desk, where I’d been sleeping—not sleeping, passed out. My neck was stiff and painful. I made myself straighten up.

“Should I turn the light on?” Jean asked.

“No.”

“Should I leave?”

I didn’t answer.

“Then I’ll stay until you definitively kick me out.” Jean came deeper into the room, plopped herself down on the worn brown-corduroy couch that for thirty years had sat in my father’s office at the University of Chicago. “I had a feeling it was you. When I heard footsteps a while ago. I couldn’t think of anybody else who’d be here on a summer night.”

“Except you,” I said dully.

“Right. Except me.”

It was like being underwater. I could hardly see her expression in the dimness. Then through the open door I heard the vending machine start up, a faint, motel-like humming. I rubbed my neck and felt the crushing weight inside inexplicably shift from my chest to my abdomen, where it weighed more and hurt more and at the same time felt more remote. If this was grief, I did not understand. I was beyond touching, this life or any other, and while Jean Olsen sat looking at me I tried to remember which drinks exactly could be bought for seventy-five cents and a trip to the faculty lounge: Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Sprite, Nestea, Dr Pepper. . . . Suddenly, the machine fell silent again. And Jean Olsen let the shoes drop off her feet onto the floor, one and then the other.

“You know,” she said, “you could really use some air in here.”

I said nothing.

“I’m going to open the window a bit, all right?” She got up and cranked open the window half a foot. Evening air breezed in, surprisingly fast. The sound of crickets. Jean sat down again. “And in spite of what you said about the light, I’m going to turn on this little reading lamp right here, okay? I think it would help.”

The lamp came on. We both sat blinking. Jean was wearing faded blue jeans and a tank top that showed off her tanned arms. Her face was handsome and strong, her hair cut shorter than mine. She was thirty-one years old, still with the tall, firm, hipless body of a girl athlete. She sat with her knees up, her bare feet comfortably splayed over the worn corduroy.

After a long silence, she said, “What happened to you and your family is beyond awful.”

“It didn’t happen to me,” I said. “It happened to Josh. He’s dead, I’m alive.”

“It happened to you too, Ethan.”

“It happened because I let it happen.”

“That’s not true—”

“What do you know about it?” I said.

“Nothing,” Jean murmured. She looked away. The room was oppressively silent.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me.”

Her shoulders rose in an uncertain shrug. “It’s okay.” She got up and went to the window, looked out through the finely meshed bug screen that made the night beyond appear washed out, used.

“How’s Blackmur?” I asked, as kindly as I could.

Jean gave a thin little smile. “Critical.”

“You’re smart, Jean. Smart and honest. It’ll work out.”

“I didn’t come in here to talk about me,” Jean said. She turned from the window and faced me. “I was thinking after I heard you come in about how you stood up for Larissa and me two years ago.”

“I didn’t do anything special.”

“We wanted to live together in a college
dorm
, Ethan, as faculty advisors and as lesbians, and you made them do the right thing. It was a big deal for us.” There was a hardback copy of Henry James’s
Notebooks
, edited by Leon Edel, sitting on my desk, and Jean reached out and picked it up. Dust grayed her fingertips and she wiped her hand on the leg of her jeans. She opened the thick book and flipped through the first few pages. Her eyes were on the writing as she said, “I guess I just wanted to come in here and remind you that you’re a good man.”

Her words did something, had an effect all their own; hidden beneath the desk, my hands gripped one another tightly. My voice was stiff. “I appreciate that, Jean.”

“I keep remembering this day last fall,” Jean said, still looking at the pages of the book. “I think it was Columbus Day, because the campus felt totally empty. I was walking past the music building, coming up here to do some work, when I heard someone playing the violin. It was really beautiful and I stopped to listen. I stuck my head inside. Josh was sitting on a chair at the back, up on that little raised platform where we have the concerts. He was practicing. There was a music stand in front of him, but most of the time he kept his eyes closed, and his body looked scrunched up and relaxed at the same time, and the sunlight was coming through one of the stained-glass windows and making his face into a rainbow. He was so beautiful, Ethan. And it was obvious you thought so, too. I could only see the back of your head. You were sitting in the last row of benches, grading papers. But every once in a while you’d look up at him and nod.”

Jean closed the book. She put it down. She looked up and saw that I was crying. “And I wanted to tell you that I never had a father like that. Most people don’t. Most people grow up waiting for their father to come and listen and nod, but he never does. He’s too busy watching the playoffs or taking the goddamn lawn mower apart to listen. You listened to him, Ethan. You
heard
him.”

I sat still behind my desk. I couldn’t speak or otherwise move, and Jean did the only right thing then.

“I’m going to leave you alone now,” she said.