The Red Book (36 page)

“I’ll be back in less than an hour,” says Jonathan, standing half in, half out the front door. Speaking of breasts and vaginas, he thinks, he could have sworn he heard Jane and Bruno getting it on in the closet last night, an act for which he takes whatever credit he’s due. He hopes the revelation of his own indiscretion allowed her, in some small way, to begin the process of forgiveness. Those two belong together, he thinks. More than she ever belonged with Hervé, as much as Jonathan admired the guy’s bravery. But after Sophie was born, well, it wasn’t that he judged Hervé for returning, again and again, to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, but, as a fellow parent, he couldn’t abide by it. Jane dialed it back, way back, and still wrote meaningful stories; why couldn’t Hervé have done the same when they offered him that position covering the
Élysée
?

One had to forgo certain things as a father, he felt. This was the pact one made with one’s children upon their conception: to do everything within one’s power, within reason, to stay alive long enough to see them through to adulthood. This had been his primary concern vis-à-vis Zoe, when Mia begged him to have one more child: He’d just turned sixty; he was sixty-one when she was born, and he’ll be seventy-nine when she graduates high school. And that’s if he’s lucky.

And so he runs. And runs. Hoping to stave off the inevitable for as long as possible.

“Take your time,” says Bruno. The weight, warmth, and fragrance of the baby asleep on his chest feels comforting in a way he has never experienced. He wonders what it would be like to breast-feed. Is it arousing? Jane once told him it was, but not in a sexual way. “In a
sensual
way,” she said. At the time he did not understand the difference between the two—sexual, sensual, it was all the same to him, whether in French, English, or Esperanto—but now, with Zoe ruffling his chest hairs with her tiny baby breaths, he gets it. Despite all of their past chitchat about not having children together—Sophie is, for all intents and purposes, his child, even if French law doesn’t technically see it that way—he makes his second and third vows of the morning: to marry Jane, if she’ll still have him, and to make a baby with her, if at all still possible. Yes, she’s forty-two, but she’s a young forty-two, with no signs yet of menopause. He will plant the seed with her tonight, after everyone heads home. That is, if the seed hasn’t already been planted.

Jonathan takes off, making his way toward Fresh Pond through the sun-dappled streets of Belmont, feeling the first welcome rush of endorphins surging through him. He’s been fairly religious about his exercise schedule, running every morning, with rare exceptions, since the day his doctor told him his cholesterol numbers were charting through the roof, but the early weeks of the new regime were brutal. His body fought him with every step.
No-no-no-no,
it seemed to be whispering, as each foot—
clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp
—fell. Psychologically, however, it’s been a no-brainer: run and live or sit on your ass and die. Never mind little Zoe, who (and this kills him,
kills
him) will most likely not have a father to walk her down the aisle, no matter how many miles or how often he runs; he has three nearly fully baked children to take into consideration as well, and they deserve an intact father for as long as humanly possible.

He always knew, marrying and fathering children as late as he did, that he would probably deprive his children of a father earlier than they (or he) would like. He holds out hope that he will one day get to meet a grandchild or two, but even if Max manages to have kids in his early thirties, Jonathan will be in his seventies by then. And unless Zoe becomes a teen mom, there’s little to no chance of him getting the chance to meet her children.

Some part of him—the part that waited so long to get married—has always wanted his films to be a catalyst, however sappy, for young love, young marriage, for having babies early enough to really enjoy them both as children and adults. He sees how much harder it is for Mia to mother Zoe at forty-two, when, in her twenties and early thirties, she had enough energy and stamina to handle all three boys effortlessly. Thank God for that, too, since he was in his early forties when the boys were born, already feeling the physical strains of age. It seems to him the whole career first/babies second model favored by a certain subset of East Coast educated intellectuals, whether men or women, puts the cart before the horse.

On the other hand, had he married and had babies with Charlene, the dancer he was seeing in his early twenties, there’s no doubt they’d now be divorced. She recently friended him on Facebook, and he could tell how incompatible they’d be simply by scrolling through her exclamation-point riddled, irony-starved updates:
Mani-pedi at Pixie Nails: awesome!
;
Off to the gym!
;
Ugh, stuck in traffic. So annoying!
It’s so hard to find the correct balance, he thinks, between career, love, sex, money, children, freedom, responsibility, fulfillment, physical health, mental health, and vitality. Most people are lucky if they get one or two right. That he has so many of them under control, at least for now—with the looming exception of their finances—seems nothing short of a miracle.

But the vitality issue is intractable. At sixty-one, he is old. There is no other euphemism for it.

Holy shit, he thinks (forgetting his age for just a moment), look at that stunning light, the way it pixellates through the trees as he moves through space, hitting the side of his face like the beam from a film projector. We are all stars of our own movies, he tells his children, but we are also its writer, creator, and narrator. (“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Max will interrupt, playfully, “and it’s our God-given duty to make it interesting. Got it, Dad. Check on the life well spent. Now can we clear our plates and have dessert?”) Jonathan imagines the tracking shot of this scene, the camera on a dolly following him down the road, the human figure kept consistently center frame until the last possible moment, when the rig should fly up on a jib for a more bird’s-eye view as the man slips out of the frame. A medium shot would be best, the body in profile, backlit, such that the sun keeps peeking around the shadowy figure, hitting the camera’s lens as it runs. And of course the sounds of huffing and puffing, the psychological struggle made aural and physical, would have to be added into the mix by his favorite Foley artist, Ben.

Voice-over would be a cop-out in this instance, he thinks—not always, but in this instance yes—and the man’s precise
pensées
themselves shouldn’t really matter to the scene, so the music should really be the mouthpiece of the inner noise without the character having to narrate it. But what music? Always tricky, music. How about something slow and ballady, by the Stones, both as a counterpoint to his movements and because it is the music of his late adolescence and thus the most visceral to him, and anyway this isn’t a real film, of course, just an imagined one, so he doesn’t have to consider things like cost and rights to a Rolling Stones song, which would be prohibitive.

He stops for a minute to run in place, spinning the dial on his iPod until “As Tears Go By” is playing. He starts to run again, imagining the scene. The song—composed in a kitchen by Mick and Keith, under duress, they were literally not allowed out by their manager, even to piss, until the song was fully baked—is as stirring as always, stoking the deepest fires of his limbic core, but no, it wouldn’t be right for the scene. For one, the melody’s too on-the-nose. For another, the lyrics would get in the way. What’s needed, really, is something somber and classical, an adagio, maybe, that could slowly build to an allegro, creating a contrapuntal dissonance, at first, between image and melody until the two could meet somewhere in the middle: an acceptance of the older self, the melancholy of the doomed. He stops again and turns the dial until he reaches Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, Op. 23 G, recorded by Arthur Rubinstein in 1959. A perfect performance, really, and a perfect counterbalance to the modern-day image of a man, a father, on the cusp of old age, running for his life.

Amazing, he thinks, how we all so willingly participate in the charade, stumbling along year after year, decade after decade, knowing from the minute we’re curious enough to ask that not only are we marked with an expiration date, but that this date—this crucial piece of information!—is unknown to us. Cannot be known to us, unless we take matters into our own hands, which several of his friends over the years have done, with varying degrees of success. It’s hard for Jonathan to imagine having nothing to live for, no hope, but he also realizes he’s in the minority. So much sadness cloaks the lives of so many, and yet even the sad ones muddle on, flocking en masse to churches and mosques, to bars and whores, to Cinderella on Ice and to his candy-coated films, because there in the dark, surrounded by the damned, they can participate in the mutual delusion of happily ever after.

It’s only recently, as he heads into his seventh decade, that he’s been feeling slightly guilty about this, his small role in the continual propagation of the untenable fantasy.

The Chopin flows through his veins like the opiates he once briefly allowed therein, back when he had long hair, a draft card, and a dog-eared copy of Kerouac in his back pocket—man, he was lucky not to have been called up, and all because he was born on June 24, number 358 in that ridiculous lottery-by-birthday drawing—until there’s only him, the Earth, the sun, the notes on the piano and two little tears forming (to his embarrassment, really, but what can he do?) at the corners of his eyes. That his story, like all stories, must end; that the world will go on without him; that these trees, this road, that dirt, those rays, such notes, his
children
will all exist without him, it’s . . . it’s . . . he can’t even come up with a proper description.
Unfathomable
comes close, but no, it’s more than that.
Mind-boggling
, yes, but it doesn’t feel specific enough. History is mind-boggling. Birth is mind-boggling. The Milky Way is mind-boggling. Hell, everything related to life, if you break it down, is mind-boggling.
Melancholy
does a decent job, but it leaves out the concomitant joy over the accumulation of years and wisdom, experience and love.

Mia: his love. They talked their way around it when they first met, the vast gulf between their ages. “I don’t care,” she said. “I love you. That’s all that matters.”

“But I’ll abandon you one day,” he said. “It’s a near certainty.”

“Nothing’s certain,” she said. But she must have known, somewhere in that giant heart of hers, that the possibility of spending a good chunk of the final third of her life without him was quite high. Now, at forty, she is still young enough to be in the apex of her story, to make some grand reversal that will forever affect her narrative arc. A part of him is jealous of this, her youth relative to his, the years she has left. He is at arc’s end, looking back with awe and appreciation yet wondering whether he has one more reversal left. He’ll find financing for his screenplay yet, if he has to get down on his knees himself to beg every wealthy person he knows to help him. It’ll be a good movie, he’s sure of it. Maybe even his best. The one his kids will be able to show their grandkids with pride. Look what your grandfather
did
!

Not that he isn’t proud of his romantic comedies, with all of those wedding photos under the closing credits, but as an artifact of life—his life, any life—well, they don’t tell the whole story. Life gets messy. For everyone. And weddings are hardly happy endings. They are the most fragile of beginnings.

He spots, in the distance, a moving van, parked in front of a house. As he approaches, a young couple comes into view. The new owners, no doubt, as the woman is standing as close to the man as she can with that enormous belly—she must be at least eight or nine months pregnant—while the man holds a small digital camera out in front of them, the lens facing inward, trying to get both their faces, his wife’s belly, and the new house in the shot.

Impossible, thinks Jonathan. He stops to help them, as usual.

“Here, let me take that for you,” he tells the young couple. “I’m a professional.”

•  •  •

Felicia Herrera, Bill
Pelton’s widow, steps up to the podium, looking every inch the female she was born and remained, even as her partner started taking the hormones that would transform her into a he and their lesbian relationship into a heterosexual one. She is slightly stocky, compact, with spiky hair dyed an unnatural shade of red, but she works the assets she does have well, wearing a low-cut dress and cranberry-colored lipstick, her eyes heavily outlined in black. “I lived with Bill for a decade, until his suicide two years ago,” she reads from her notes, without looking up.

Mia and Jane exchange glances. Addison pokes Mia in the ribs. Clover raises her eyebrows. They’d all suspected Belinda had killed herself, or rather that Bill had killed himself—it was so hard to refer to Belinda as Bill when they’d all known him as a woman—but Jane had heard from someone, she can’t remember whom, that Bill had died in a car crash.

“Really?” Mia had said. “I heard it was a suicide.”

Addison had heard the same thing, and Clover had no solid information one way or the other, though she was admittedly curious to find out how Bill had died, which was always the first piece of information she’d try to extract from her parents whenever someone on the commune went off the rails, never to return. (She was the only one of her roommates in college never to try LSD or anything stronger than pot, since “acid freak-out” and “overdose” were frequently the answers.) She, too, suspected from having read the obituaries in both
Harvard Magazine
and the red book that Bill had killed himself, but the monthly alumni magazine hardly ever bothers to mention the cause of death in their back-of-the-book memorials, and the red book has always remained consistently vague on the topic: just the date of birth and the date of death and a few innocuous biographical tidbits in between.