Driver's Education (28 page)

It wasn't her, though, and we both knew it. Finn was growing too quickly, he was changing; the last thing a child provides is certainty, and certainty was the one thing she craved. So Clare—she was Debra Winger in
Terms of Endearment,
or Lana Turner in
Cass Timberlane
. She only took to mothering so much as those roles would allow her, and so I suppose I wasn't surprised—not honestly, at least—when she told me on our son's first birthday that she was planning on returning to acting. That she needed new sources of inspiration, new examples of life.

We were sitting in our kitchen with Finn, who was struggling to remove a paper party hat we'd fixed to his head.

“What do you mean you're going back?” I said. “And to
what
career?”

She was cutting squares of white-frosted cake, and I watched as her grip tightened on the knife's handle.

“What about staying here? What about raising your son?”

“Don't be such a chauvinist.” She used the broad surface of the knife to scoop the slices onto red plastic plates. “I'm talking about some commercial work. A few auditions a week. And besides—he's your son, too.”

“I'm sure Ron has found someone else to cast.”

“Oh, ha ha. A clever one, aren't you.”

“But what will we do?”

“
Jesus,
Colin, it's not like you're dealing with E.T. here. He's your
son
. You'll feed him. Change his diaper when he craps. Maybe take him on a walk if you both get bored.”

She passed Finn a piece of cake and he promptly speared it with his thumb.

“No,” she told him. “Don't do that.”

The first few days we did little more than stare at each other. I'd moved my computer to the living room so I could work in sight of Finn's playpen—a subtly unnerving cage decorated with primary colors and eerie insects with Cheshire-cat grins. Two months earlier he'd taken his
first step, and so his mornings were now spent standing, stepping, blinking, falling. Occasionally, he'd kick a discarded rattle, which would cause him to break into a gurgled liquid laugh. Whenever I left, it was only for a moment—to use the toilet, to fill a bowl of cereal—still, though, he'd cry instantly; I'd disappear behind the living room door, and right away the screams would start. Rushing back, I'd find him propped up against one of the playpen's mesh walls, his chubby fingers pinching the nylon frame. Sometimes he'd silence immediately, and sometimes his wails would continue. He'd gaze at me for one quiet moment and then hurl his head back farther, stretching his mouth to an even wider, more anguished angle. He'd say,
Oh, you. You're not who I was asking for.
Sometimes:
I was expecting someone else. Specifically
—
her.

It was during one of these fits on the fourth day that I took him from the playpen. While his cries reverberated off the walls of the room, I brought him to my desk, to my computer, and bounced him lightly on my knee. My left arm was wrapped tightly around his fleshy midsection and I could feel his lungs fill with tiny bubbles of air. With my right hand I typed:

Shh.

Shhhhhhhhhhh.

I'm your father.

You're my son.

There's not a lot I can do to change that.

As I typed and as he bounced, his crying slowly began to stop: his wails decreased in volume till they dissolved into soft, wet vowels. He reached out to me and touched my face.

Those are my cheeks.

Those are my lips.

That is my heart.

Pick your own nose.

•  •  •

“How'd it go today?” Clare would ask when she returned home in the evening. I would have just bathed Finn and we would be sitting in the kitchen with the windows flung open, the salty Pacific air clinging to our tongues, our eyelashes.

“Fine,” I'd tell her. “Better.”

She'd be trying to get him to eat, but he was becoming more and more difficult with her. From his high chair he'd pitch handfuls of mushed-up peas and overcooked carrots. Shredded pieces of noodles would hang from Clare's hair.

“Let me try,” I'd tell her, slipping an arm around her waist.

“No. No, I've got it.”

Finn would turn over a plate of sliced hot dogs, and the pink pieces would tumble down Clare's loose shirt. She'd stand, frustrated.

“He's being impossible.”

Again I'd say, “Let me try,” and he'd eat.

•  •  •

She started going on calls that were earlier in the morning and later in the evening; she'd leave us alone for vast stretches of the day and would rarely check in. When she did return home, I'd often be in bed, the blinds in our room drawn to keep out L.A.'s perpetual purple glow. In the dark I'd hear her undress—the dull thud of her shoes being kicked against the wall, the swoosh of a silk skirt floating down to her ankles. When she crawled into bed, she'd fold herself against my chest and I'd smell the smoke in her hair. I'd try to remember what I wrote in the fan letters I'd sent her, back when I was convincing her to love me, back when we weren't competing for attention from ourselves.

“Traffic on the 10 was nuts,” she'd say.

“This late?” I'd keep my eyes closed.

“There was an accident at Pico.”

“You're awful with directions.”

Most times, she'd already be asleep.

The next morning, I'd type to Finn:

What do you think it is today?

I'd guide his doughy hand to the keyboard and I'd let him pluck at random letters.

Rqndavt

You think? My bet's a walk-on on some soap.

Xq436dn

You think she got it?

1ngr

Me neither.

When spring was tilting toward summer, we'd abandon the computer, our joint writing, and go on long, aimless walks along the Santa Monica boardwalk and pier. We'd watch surfers vanish into collapsing aqueous tunnels; we'd hold our breath until they'd reemerge from the wave's foamy backwash. We'd feed potato chips to the gulls, laughing and cringing as they wrestled for the crumbs, as they beat their filthy wings into one another's chests. If the sun wasn't too strong, and the temperature not too hot, I'd let him bury his feet in the sand.

“That's what you'll build castles with,” I'd tell him.

He'd point out at the ocean, to the swimmers and the boats with their white stretched sails.

“That's what you'll swim across.”

A girl would trot by, her heels kicking up small explosions of sand, her legs smooth bronzy pillars.

“That's what'll break your heart.”

•  •  •

“You love him more than you love me.”

It was September 28, 1989—almost two years after the earthquake. Finn, who now spoke (but too quickly, much too quickly, and with an inability to pronounce
r
s) had just been put to bed, and Clare and I had opened a bottle of wine in the kitchen. Her back was pressed into the white tile counter; her face was too heavily made-up from a panty-hose
commercial she'd shot that afternoon—her first job since returning to acting. Milky foundation an inch thick. Pink cheeks. Lips the color of overripe apples.

“That's ridiculous.” And then, “I can't take you seriously when you're wearing all that stuff on your face.”

“I like it. I feel like myself in it.” I handed her a glass of wine, and when she drank from it she tattooed the rim with her painted mouth. “And it's not ridiculous.”

“It is.”

She said, “But it's still the truth.”

And it was, which I think is what made it so terrible. It was something that both she and I had come to realize, separately, over the past year: that without Clare I'd still exist as some version of myself, but that without Finn, without the opportunity to shape his world, an integral part of me would be lost. I'd sense her resentment of me, of him—the way her voice tightened whenever the three of us were in a room and the attention slipped away from her, the way she became frustrated with his speech problems, the way she'd tell him she didn't understand him. And I understood it. I understood the frustration over watching something that had once been hers—ours—gradually become mine. Still, though, I didn't know how to reverse it. Or, what's more: I wasn't willing to try.

“What would you have me do?” I asked her.

“I don't know,” she said. “Love me a little more. Love him a little less.”

“That's a terrible thing to say.”

“I'm going to bed,” she said.

“Wash that shit off your face first. It'll stain the pillows.”

She finished the wine in two large swallows.

•  •  •

When she left, it was with a letter that wasn't even her own. She copied the note that actress-writer Jacqueline Susann wrote to her husband Irving Mansfield when he was drafted into World War II. She taped all four sides of the paper on which she wrote it to the surface of the kitchen table, as if she were afraid the thing would blow away and that she wanted to ensure, against all possible odds, that I'd find it. Which I
did. After returning from a walk with Finn. I told him to empty the sand from his shoes while I read and then reread the note. She didn't even edit the sentences to make them relevant.

“She left to be someone else.” I was saying it to no one, or maybe to myself, but Finn heard me anyway. I hadn't heard him pad softly back in from the garage.

“You can do that?” He was four at this point. His speech was still muddled, but he'd learned to slow himself, to breathe between his sentences.

•  •  •

And now, the second earthquake: it struck in January of 1994 when Finn was six, and it was eighty times larger than the first. It split streets and crumbled freeways; it dug up giant trees by their roots and tossed them like toothpicks across power lines. The news aired footage of entire houses that had been shifted into neighboring properties. When the dust cleared and the sirens stopped, sixty people would be counted dead. Thousands more would be injured, and forty thousand buildings would be destroyed—including half our house.

“Maybe it's a good thing,” I told Finn as we picked through the rubble. Toeing through broken chairs, collapsed plaster walls. Pieces of his old rattle that I'd saved.

“Why?”

“We've got insurance, and I'd been thinking it was time to move anyway. This place was starting to feel small.”

“There's only just the two of us though.”

But it wasn't just the two of us. I didn't know how to explain to Finn that during the preceding years his mother had been appearing everywhere. Not her actual flesh and blood, per se (the last time I had seen her was two winters before, when I had caught the latter half of the pantyhose commercial she filmed at the end of our marriage; I'd heard rumors that she'd run off somewhere with someone, that she was in Chicago, or Seattle, but that was never confirmed), but the essence of her, the things that made her up. On the corner of Olympic and Western: a girl smoking a cigarette in the same lips-out fashion practiced by Clare outside the Avalon. At the intersection of San Vicente and Pico: a boy drinking
a beer, grasping the bottle by the neck like the way she'd showed me how to drink. In a theater on Melrose: two kids kissing once the house lights had dimmed. Before, all these things seemed like such derivatives, actions Clare had copied and practiced after recording them in her book. But now, they seemed to stem from her as original, as just the way she was. She'd learned to live as everyone, and because of that I could never escape her. She'd be in the car next to me on a crowded freeway; she'd be the waitress at the diner where I took Finn for burgers. She'd be so universally present in L.A. that much of the time it seemed there existed really only three kinds of people: Finn, 9 million Clares, and me.

“Where are we going to move?”

“I was thinking north. San Francisco.”

“There are earthquakes there, too, Dad.”

I felt a shard of glass crunch beneath the heel of my sneaker. Above us, Los Angeles' low-hanging sky was smogged over and grey.

•  •  •

We moved that June, once Finn had finished the first grade. I found us the house where I still live—the old Victorian on Vallejo Street in Cow Hollow. It was taller than it was wide—like a set of ill-fitting blocks stacked on top of one another, but not quite perfectly. From the bay windows, though, you could see the verdant hills of Tiburon, the way the fog pooled and clung to their broad wet bases. It'd been empty for years, the house, and during that time it'd fallen into a state of disgrace: coats of paint had been stripped away by the city's dense marine layer, revealing cracks in the home's wood paneling that formed strange shapes. I convinced myself that I'd make the repairs myself, and at first I took to the task with a cinematic sense of gusto. I'd nail, and sand, and saw each afternoon. I'd measure things when I already knew their lengths; I'd carry around odd wrenches and wear ridiculous belts.

But that faded. I got tired of the banging, the splinters, the gut knowledge that there're only so many ways to fix something that'll eventually fall apart again anyway. And so, over the course of that summer, we learned to dodge the house's hazards—or, perhaps more aptly, we learned to suit them to our lives. We determined that the broken sink in
the bathroom—the one that shot water up through a slit in the faucet—was ideal for washing your face. We used loose kitchen tiles as coasters. We placed plants and potted flowers beneath the leaks in the ceiling. We communicated through the open spaces in the floorboards; we'd have hour-long conversations from different rooms, different levels.

And then two months after we'd settled in, I received a call from a woman in New York. She told me that her name was Helen, and that she was the current manager of the Avalon. She said she wanted to inform me that the theater was closing.