Stranger, Father, Beloved (16 page)

Michael took one last look at the photo and tossed it into the trash. It immediately passed through the airy layers of paper towels and landed with a thud at the bottom. He imagined it beaded with moisture from soggy dripping paper left from the many pairs of hastily washed hands. He was glad that it was buried there, yet it also made
his skin crawl to visualize it caught in the refuse, sad and ridiculous. Panic gripped him for a moment as he thought of the situation with Ryan. Where was she?

Something began to creep at the edge of his mind, something that had not occurred to him for a long time. It felt like a sickness and it seemed to seethe somewhere in his depths. An image was taking form. He pushed the thought away and thought about Nancy.

Michael went over the choices that made up his life again. He had gone willingly into a situation, a marriage, that he knew did not have the magic that binds two people. Yet there had been a momentum at the time; things had been set in motion, heading in a definite direction, right or not. He realized that he and Nancy must have come together to create Ryan, to breathe life into her restless soul and make her real, physical. And his thoughtful, quiet little son. Michael had been born and had married Nancy for the sole purpose of creating those two children, both unique and beautiful in their own way. That must have been it, he mused. Now Michael knew it was time for him to bow out of the picture.

He sat down on the bathroom floor at the thought, one hand wrapped around the edge of the sink. God, it was all so clear, he realized. He slapped the tiles. So remarkably clear! He sat for a minute enjoying his clear mind and then he stood up, covered his hands in the pink soap from the dispenser, and washed and dried them.

He began to recall a wonderful family trip to the Grand Canyon when Ryan was eight years old, almost nine. They had gone rafting down the canyon and camped at night with their guide and two other families. That was the year before Max was born and it had been a good one for the family as a little happy threesome. The water had reflected off the canyon walls as they drifted down, and Michael could remember the burnt salmon color of the steep rock walls alongside
the river. They had of course chosen a very easy route since Ryan was little, so they all drifted along, silenced by the beauty of nature, often happy in their own thoughts and smiling at one another over peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when they stopped for lunch. At the end of the three-day rafting trip, they had stayed in a little cabin on the edge of the rim of the Grand Canyon. Their little one-room cabin had a fireplace, which Michael had lit and sat in front of, holding Ryan as the two read at night. Nancy had joined them with a novel, too, and the three had sat there together. Michael had not wanted to leave at the end of it. He had been aware that he might never be this happy again for quite some time. He remembered standing on the edge of the canyon, snapping photo after photo with his plastic disposable camera until the clicks ran out. Then he had just stood there, peering out at some eagles circling overhead the rows and rows of dazzling colored stone.

Michael went back to his desk and looked through the pile of papers on it. It was obvious that there was no more work to be done, and it was well after nine o'clock. There was no way he could keep Rebecca there any longer and not seem as though he were either insane or perverted. He would have to go it alone.

Michael went out to her cubicle. She was filing her nails absentmindedly while she read an email. She looked tired. He observed her. No doubt she must be as confused as he was. She must have often felt incomplete in this meaningless job. She probably wished she were famous, a movie star or something. She probably felt she was movie star material, secretly, and treasured that knowledge like a precious jewel inside her—silly women and their fantasies of grandeur.

“Thanks for staying so long, Rebecca. You were a big help. Have a great night, and see you on Monday.” He tried to sound as normal as possible to conceal any trace of his insanity—the insanity he was sure everybody could see and that he never felt confident he could cover. It suddenly took all of his self-control not to reach out and pull her to him. Her loyalty and kindness that evening inspired an overwhelming need in him for the presence of another body. Even ­wrestling would suffice at that moment. Michael held his hands tightly together and walked back into his office, smiling like an idiot, then safely closed the door. Once inside, he began to pace around the room. He felt he wasn't hard-wired right; his nerves ran on strange impulses, as if they needed some reprogramming.

Michael contemplated going home, but that seemed entirely wrong. Home felt volatile, unsafe. Potential eruptions could happen at any time—such as a daughter rounding a corner and shoving him or delivering another awful slap. Or there was the chance that he himself might be the one to lunge out. Who knew what he was capable of, what he would do if he saw her? That satisfied look on Ryan's face—just the sight of her might send him into a rage, and he wouldn't be able to stop from hurting her or humiliating her in some way, putting her in her place.

These thoughts were really too much for him. He sat down at his desk and looked around the bleak room. Well, since he was staying, he would need to make a little camp for himself on the floor. And he would need entertainment of some kind for the evening. A bottle. He would need a bottle of some kind of harsh liquid like vodka that would burn its way down his throat and create delirium. He grabbed his jacket and headed out. This time when he returned, he would be stocked—he would have the supplies he needed for the night to work out.

Tipping back the newly acquired bottle of vodka, Michael remembered the time when Ryan was seven and had gotten the notion that she had been adopted. He figured she must have seen some movie where a girl found that information out. He would catch her hunting around his office files, going through papers in each file cabinet, crying.

“You're our girl. I don't know why you think you belong to someone else. Aren't we good enough?” He would say it tenderly. He had found the whole thing extremely amusing, and he had felt his love for her grow as he watched her distressed face.

“I'm sure of it. You don't have to wait until I'm older to tell me. Tell me now.” Michael was down on one knee, and she had looked right into his eyes, searching them. One time she had collapsed into little sobs, saying “Tell me, tell me” repeatedly. He loved her strangeness and her intensely wound personality. He thanked God to have been given her. She would be the perfect companion for him, if only there weren't so much distance between them now.

The more Michael drank, the freer of his mind he became; the world was giddy and fun. He looked at the bottle of vodka in his hand. Half of it was gone. He could not believe that he had drunk so much. See, Nancy? See, world? He could hold his liquor. He felt like a boy again, sitting on the rug. The room was blurred, and he could not sit up without spinning, so he lay down and passed out drunk on his office floor.

When he awoke, it was a couple of hours later. He switched to vodka mixed with the orange juice he had purchased. At some point later in the night, after his second screwdriver, he had left for a walk and had ended up at a store that sold adult movies. Miraculously, he
had made it back to his office in his drunken state, and the neon yellow bag from his half-remembered excursion sat in the corner of the room.

The night continued in a blur. He took one of his pills, which sent him to a deeper realm of drunkenness before he fell asleep and had a tortured dream of chasing something. He awoke reclined in his office chair with his feet up on the desk and the orange juice on the floor. He checked the clock and saw it was 3:05 a.m. Across the room, he saw a TV on a stand. Apparently, in his blacked-out state, he had wheeled a TV/VCR from the conference room into his office. He didn't remember doing it. It now sat unilluminated in the corner of the room. His fairly large office had a small couch and two chairs on the other side of the desk. Two huge glass windows were on the opposing walls, showing the fluorescent lights from other offices across the street and neon lights from the restaurants below. The curtains on the windows were drawn aside with a sash. Michael sat drinking and thinking about how odd it was that curtains would be hung in a corporate office, as if they were trying to make it like home. As if the place knew that he would need to stay here. Tonight it felt like home,
his
place. The glass coffee table by the little couch shone with such cleanliness and purpose that he felt even more that yes, this place had been designed for him only.

Michael looked at the bag of videos. What had he bought? He tried to remember. One was the standard, about girls and a variety of silly sex scenarios. Another one was a sampler of experimental things called
Hot Shocks
. He really had no idea what he would see on it, just that he hoped it would be weird and entertaining. But he resisted putting the video in. He just continued to sit, hands resting on his legs, gazing at the lights outside his window. If he kept his eyes out of focus, he could only see blurred white streaks or hazy patches of
color. He could sit there all night, drinking and half looking. The videos really had no purpose for him, he thought, but they'd be there if he needed them, if the boredom got to be too much.

For what seemed to him like the millionth time, he went through his daily drill of thinking what his life would be like if he had become an academic. He would have had a smaller house and would probably be unmarried. He would have had students devoted to him. He would have had tenure and the summers off to write, and dinners with his friends who had stayed on and taught. He and Alex would have had their offices next door to each other, and after an afternoon of talking with students in their private offices, they would emerge tired and walk to the campus pub and order hamburgers and beers. Their students would be sitting in booths and would have waved at their favorite professors when Michael and Alex came into the bar.

He thought back to that rainy night in college when he and Alex had run from the library, a little after midnight, and stopped in Alex's dorm room to dry off. His own dorm room was farther away and the rain was coming down hard, so Alex's room was the logical place to go to. Earlier in the night, they had each worked on an essay, as the water had pounded the tall stained-glass walls of the beautiful old library. It being a Saturday night, the library had been almost completely empty, and the campus, too, was strangely vacant. It appeared that the world of other people had retreated completely out of view due to the rain. In Alex's single dorm room, they had taken off their shirts and pants, leaving on their underwear, and wrapped towels around their chests. Michael had sprawled out on the floor of the room after Alex threw him a pillow from the bed. The heater was on full blast, and both men had realized how tired they were.

Alex had been different from his usual self and surprised Michael by producing a small bottle of bourbon. He had poured two small glasses and handed one to Michael, smiling. With Alex lying on his bed and Michael on the carpet with a pillow, with only the small lamp on in the corner of the room, the two had talked about their families and finally drifted to sleep, listening to the rain. He could feel the heat from the radiator warming him.

Suddenly it occurred to him that maybe it wasn't too late to get his PhD—maybe he could still do it even though he was in his forties. But he could not imagine such a thing, could not imagine returning to grad school and sitting in the classes with young people. He saw it as too much like an admission of failure, his tail between his legs. He wouldn't try to follow another course.

Michael popped in the video of the girls and watched the plots with attempted glee. If he was going to misbehave, he better try and enjoy it. The second one was even an office seduction that tickled him. But twenty minutes into it, as he sat Indian-style on the carpet gazing up at the screen, he could not watch anymore. The girls in the video, probably all eighteen years old or so, reminded him too much of his daughter. There was a certain look in their eyes that Ryan had—a stunned kind of look, an unsure kind of invitation, vacant heated anger. He found it disgusting for a man of his age to watch such young women. It was sick, and luckily he discovered he did not get any pleasure from seeing girls in naked vulnerable positions. In fact, the sexual acts made his stomach turn. He was a father now, and this kind of nonsense was something he had outgrown. He put in
Hot Shocks
and made himself another drink. The men were really going at it. The penetration between the men seemed deeper somehow.

He had never gotten sex right. It was never right no matter whom
he was with. He had been with one other woman in college before Nancy. Beth had been in his philosophy class, and he had taken her back to his dorm room one night after she had flirted with him all throughout the course of a party. From what he could remember of the night, he thought it had gone pretty well. Beth had seemed satisfied, and she had left the next day smiling with the assurance that they were an item. In class, Michael had given her cold looks. He had wanted to be the one to decide who would be his girlfriend—he didn't want the decision thrust upon him. At first Beth had been shocked, but soon she got the hint and didn't look his way anymore. He didn't like the way she dressed anyway—her printed skirts were too bright and cheery, and she was keen on wearing pastel sweaters that were the exact color of the flowers on her skirt.

He switched off the movie and lay back on the carpet. An intense hunger stormed in his stomach. That relieved him, as it told him what the next activity would be. He would go out to an all-night diner and get some food—something greasy and thick. He could do greasy because he was so thin. No matter what he ate, none of it ever stayed on his bones. It all disintegrated. He was the only person he knew in his forties who could eat whatever he wanted and not suffer any noticeable changes in his weight. Nothing would absorb, nothing would settle. Yet his body displeased him.