The Laws of our Fathers (72 page)

    'Like baldness?' asks Sarah. Around the table, there is a thunderous laughter. On Sonny's lap, Nikki roars, too, for the sheer joy of participating. Seth levels a finger at Hobie and tells him to take note of what you get when the last tuition bill is paid.

    'So what's the rest?' asks Sarah. 'This is cool. I want to hear more.'

    'Okay,' Seth answers. 'Well, naturally the next impulse is people want to improve upon themselves through genetic engineering. They don't want their kid to be stuck being them exactly. He'll be like me, but with my grandfather's talent for music, my mother's for math. And on the other hand, aberrant genes can be repaired. No one need have sickle cell or Tay-Sachs. Of course, there is a potential for horrible mischief, people experimenting, or creating geeks or Hitlers from their own DNA. And so all gene choice and repair is conducted under the auspices of a federal agency, the Biomedical Genetic Engineering Administration, which must consider all applications for genetic alterations. And here our story begins.

    'It is one of the legacies of slavery that virtually all African-Americans carry some white genes. Not long after BGEA has been opened, word leaks out that an unknown number of black parents have applied to have white children. This causes tremendous agitation around the country. Racist whites don't want blacks 'passing' this way - even though they'll be white in every real sense - while many African-Americans feel these parents are turning their backs on their heritage. Some white leaders, including a few generally regarded as progressive, urge all African-Americans to take this step and thus, in a single generation, to put race behind us as a national issue. They are denounced by most blacks and many whites, a few of whom, in defiance, apply to have black-skinned children. Pressure is brought on Congress to prevent race-crossing. A law is enacted, but the Supreme Court strikes it down, ruling that the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to be whatever color they want. Now the nation is in turmoil. The Biomedical Genetic Engineering Administration is looted and the names of the black parents who have applied is discovered; around the nation four of them are lynched. Facilities doing gene alteration are sabotaged. Civil war erupts, with racist whites fighting beside the Nation of Islam. The cities burn again.' Seth rattles his fingers down like rain. 'Fade scene. So?' he asks. The silence is prolonged.

    ‘I liked the stories you used to tell a lot better,' Sonny says.

    'Uncle Hobie's right,' says Sarah. 'You're twisted.'

    'Hey,' says Seth. 'You guys asked for it.'

    'It's upsetting, Seth,' says Sonny. 'It's provocative.'

    Hobie, who has been fumbling with his beard for some time, says, 'I think it's a righteous story.'

    'My pal,' says Seth.

    'God,' says Lucy in reply. 'The two of you never understand the way you sound to anybody else. That's a terrible story.' ' Sure it is,' says Hobie. 'But true. Fact is, nobody in this country, black or white, knows how they wanna feel about difference. There plenty of white folks in this country, maybe even most of them these days, tellin themselves they ain't so hung up. You give them one of those nice-type black people they see on TV to move in next door - Clint Huxtable or Whoopi Goldberg or Michael Jordan - somebody, you know, who lives and talks like them, fine by them. Only whoever it is, don't you dare marry my daughter and hand me no darkie grandchild. And we aren't a damn bit better. We-all are proud of being different, we wanna be different, 'cept when white folks say we are. Don't nobody mention the number of black players in the NBA. Cause then we feel it's a curse, as if that difference runs straight from the skin right through the soul. We're all fucked up, all of us, and not gettin any better.'

    Lucy looks to Sonny. 'They both believe we're doomed.'

    'Not doomed,' says Seth. 'Just in deep, deep trouble.' His wife makes a face and Seth repeats himself: Deep trouble. Still in her black dress, Lucy pulls in obvious agitation at each of the sleeves and leans across the table toward Seth.

    ‘I won't listen to this. Not tonight. I don't want to hear how bad it is, how hopeless, how urban life is going to be roving bands of murderous hoodlums fighting it out with armed militias, while the rest of us cower from both.'

    'Maybe you should drive down to Grace Street, Luce. Or spend time sitting beside Sonny and hear what passes in front of her on the average day.'

    Sonny shoots him a severe look and mouths quite clearly, Leave me out.

    'It's not just one way, Seth. Why won't you ever see it? Years ago, you committed yourself to making things better. And they are better. We - all of us in this country - we've accomplished an enormous amount. Why doesn't anybody ever say that? Why doesn't anybody give themselves just a minute of joy? You tell me another century when so many people made so many advances against the kinds of tyranny human beings have always imposed on each other.'

    She is reaching toward him, imploring, Sonny sees, near tears. This is the heart of what Lucy knows she can offer him. Himself. Who he was and longs for, if he will just re-establish his courage and his faith. It's too private, too unsettling to Sonny to witness this appeal. Nikki has edged over to Seth's knee and, muttering that she'll be right back, Sonny heads into the kitchen, where she withdraws a bottle of spring water from the refrigerator, a chugging Shelvador, forty years old if a day. The whole kitchen is a relic, with white metal cabinets so old the runners have fallen out of the drawers, and a floor of black and white linoleum squares. Sonny finds a glass - they are all, as Seth long claimed, foodstore giveaways - and gulps the water down.

    Whoever said we could name our feelings? It's an old riddle, left over from the foregone life of a philosophe at Miller Damon. The way any individual sees the color green can be measured now; a probe to the optic nerve would find the same chemicals annealing in the neurons of almost all of us. But this contorted stirring, the sensation that someone has driven rivets through her heart, the twisting fore and back, is simply what it is, the massive accumulation of a day, a life, and is wholly unique to her. Who has the right to call it by any known word, whether it's iove' or 'regret' or 'pain'?

    From the dining room Hobie's voice booms out. He's telling a story about a Fourth of July years ago, when he was still married to his second wife. Seth, a second later, peeks in from the doorway.

    'Don't kill me, okay, but I turned on the TV for Nikki. "God, Seth, this is so cool. There's no color." I mean, is this the next wave?'

    She returns his smile wanly. Sonny keeps telling him he has to learn to say no to Nikki, to stop acting like a doting aunt. But there's not much point in that discussion right now.

    'What's the matter?' He edges in. 'My story get to you?'

    ‘I suppose. There's a lot to talk about. It's been a hard day for all of us.'

    He looks behind him, then crosses the kitchen and takes her in his arms. He asks if she's okay. She does not answer, but falls against him. Beside them, the window, opened for the cross-draft when the house was crowded, remains unclosed in spite of the growing nighttime chill. The wind kicks up, transmitting the sound of a cat a few houses down, squalling in some act of overheated masculinity. The air, the sound, Seth's presence, raises within her the first faint throb of sexual need. Amid all the uncertainty between them, their lovemaking has been a spectacular success. She has had these periods before with a couple of other men - Charlie was one - and when you're into it, sex, having great sex, it seems to be the center of the world. All other connections grow slightly more remote. In the last hour of the day, when Nikki is in bed, Sonny turns to him, as formerly she turned to herself. He brings her a glass of wine. They drink. They make love. Sometimes it goes on. He roams. He approaches from behind. The side. He leaves. He caresses her ankles, knees, the vulva, then mounts her again reeking with her strong female scent. It feels always, as the minutes pass, as if they are going deeper and deeper into one another. The twined fingertips. The pleasure points. The outbreak of exulting sound. As if they were twins, separate selves swimming toward the retained memory of how they issued from the same core. The flooding recollection of this now is moving, disturbing. She will hate herself if she comes to tears.

    'How are you doing?' she asks.

    Confused, he says. Numb.

    'I nearly wrote you a letter last night.'

    'Did you? Was it a love letter?' He rears back with that puckish smile. Always the jokes, the hapless defenses.

    'It was condolences, Seth.'

    'Oh.'

    'And I tore it up because I didn't know exactly what to say.' 'I'm not sure I would, either.'

    'No, I mean about us. I didn't know what to say about us. I didn't know what right or role I'd have comforting you tomorrow or the day after.'

    'Oh.' He lets her go. 'Is that what we have to talk about?' His innocence is such a complete show she has to stifle an urge to pinch him. His eyes, in fact, are watery with fear.

    'This may be the wrong time.'

    He looks back to the dining room. Hobie is talking about fireworks, imitating his wife, Khaleeda, as she begged him not to set them off around the girls. His mimicry, always perfect, has Lucy and Sarah in the heat of laughter.

    'Go on,' Seth says. 'It's working on you. Let's hear it.'

    'Well, Seth. I already said it. What are you doing? Say, tomorrow. Are you staying? Going?'

    'Tomorrow? Look, you know I've been promising Moritz for two weeks I'll come out to Seattle so I can meet with the people at the
PI
face to face. I said I'd leave as soon as the funeral is over. You know that. And it's Passover anyway. Sarah wants to have it with Lucy now. She asked if we could all be together. So I'll probably fly out tomorrow.'

    'And then? How long will you be there?'

    His mouth parts vaguely. He slumps a bit, backed up against the old black counter on which the linoleum's secured by steel borders.

    'I'm entitled to ask, Seth, aren't I?'

    'Of course,' he says, but averts himself somewhat. 'Look, I have to get down to it. I know we're there. Only, I want to be sure you realize it's not only me. Do you know that?'

    In the four years since Charlie fell out of the picture, she never seemed to recall his most fundamental complaints, that she was cold at the core, elusive. At his angriest, he wrote a poem: Humans have four-chambered hearts, You keep three for yourself. She was crushed by those lines and happily forgot them until Seth cautiously began to hint at the same thing.

    'I know that,' she says.

    'Because,' he says, 'there's a way we've never gone one step beyond where we were last December - when you were calling this a childhood romance? There's a level where you don't believe me. Or won't take me seriously.'

    ‘I take you seriously, Seth. But I'm afraid.'

    'Of?'

    ‘I don't know. It's hard to say.'

    He runs down a list of possibilities and she says no each time. She's not afraid of being hurt. Or being abandoned again. Or the mess of another breakup.

    'So?' he asks.

    She has her arms about herself in the cool air. The kitchen light is bright.

    'Seth, I don't know. I hear Hobie call you "Proust" sometimes and I guess - I quiver. It scares me. That you remember every detail about your friends from college. That you're still hung up on what Loyell Eddgar did to you twenty-five years ago, as if it happened yesterday. Because I can't help thinking that's the same reason you're here with me, trying to pick up where we left off.'

    'And the reason is? I'm not following.'

    ‘I think what I'm afraid of is that beneath it all, Seth, you've been trying to figure out one thing, which is, basically, how you might have been happier. If you'd stayed with me, if you'd faced down Eddgar, would your life have turned out differently? Would you be more complete? Would it have turned out, if you'd been tougher or luckier, something - Would it have turned out he didn't have to die, Seth?'

    She stops for a second, to see if she's gone too far. Across the kitchen his eyes are flat, his jaw turns a bit. But he seems to be taking it.

    'That's why it scares me,' she says. 'Because in the end, Seth, sooner or later, you're going to get a grip, you're going to see what everybody has to see. You're going to say,' ‘I can't disrespect the life I've lived. I can't pretend I don't have these connections. I could have had a different life, but I didn't." I think you're thinking those things right now.'

    'Look,' he says, but says no more for quite some time. In his white shirt, he too has crossed his arms in the chill. 'This is really complicated. Maybe we should save this. Why don't you take Nikki home? And then I'll swing by whenever we're done here.' His approach seals off the window, so she unexpectedly catches a swirling breath of the warm air still hovering in the house, which carries the stimulating current of his presence. He wants to sleep with her, she realizes. When all this anguish is expressed, when they have pulverized themselves with this raw cavalcade of doubt and high emotion, that ardor will fuse itself in motion, contact, pleasure, and connection, so that something will be left. When he goes in the morning, there will be a wake of tenderness as well as pain, something to return to. 'We'll talk, okay?'

    'We have to.'

    In the dining room, Hobie's voice booms out: 'I light the first sparklin devil and it spins around shootin sparks and whatnot, and all the sudden, the sucker rolls right under my car, my brand-new Mercedes 560 SEL, and I swear to God, swear, the whole fucking car, man, goes like kaboom - there's a flash of light, you'd have thought God, man, was behind the wheel.' Lucy's and Sarah's laughter, the identical high-pitched squeal from mother and daughter, peals from the dining room. Hobie's wheezing too hard to continue.