Stranger, Father, Beloved (17 page)

Michael stumbled to his feet and looked around the room. What if someone came in? That was hardly likely. He stashed the movies and the bottle in a drawer and left the room. He was still drunk, but he found that if he pulled it together for a few moments, he could pass for sober if he encountered another person. He walked to an all-night diner he knew of that was four blocks away.

Once at the diner, he sat with his eggs and fries and thought about the Peninsula. It was just waiting there forty miles away. It was a chilly night, which meant the Peninsula would be covered in fog at its desolate tip. Michael got the distinct sensation of what it would be like for him to live there alone. He felt what it would be like to be an unconnected man, like those writers who lived alone in large homes far out on the Peninsula. He could have that life—a life of no connections. It was a thrilling idea: to be a person of intrigue, a recluse, a social anomaly. Then he would not have to see his wife in their home, always waiting for something, always primed for some experience that was never going to happen.

This diner served alcohol, too, and the waitress happily brought him a hot toddy. Michael cupped the warm mug in his hands and thought of Alex, his softness, his intelligent eyes. He thought of the many nights the two of them had stayed at the college library in the big reading room, studying until they were the only ones left in the room, and they would laugh and look around themselves and finally go home. They knew they possessed a kind of dedication that none of their classmates had, a diligence that produced success, a delirious kind of pledge to their work that made them stand out. Alex always made coffee runs for the two of them and would place Michael's cup next to him wordlessly and expect no thanks. Those moments were Michael's favorite—the lack of ceremony, the respect for silence that Alex had was precious to him. Such a simple thing, yet it meant everything to him.

To be able to sit with another person and not to have to talk was the most priceless thing in the world. He had never met another person like Alex in his entire life, and he probably never would. He had
never told Alex about his mental problems, but he could tell he knew. Alex saw him for who he was and accepted him—there was no need to explain anything.

And to think if during junior year he had just stayed in and studied that night as Alex had wanted to instead of dragging him to that party, Meg never would have come into their lives. When he had seen the two of them together for the first time, he had assumed it must be a silly fling, but somehow it just kept lasting and lasting. Michael had made cracks about her, for she was a mousy, loudmouthed little thing, and Alex had stormed out on him one night, making his one and only angry remark: “You are so hateful!”

Those four little words had stung, and they had made an impression on Michael's heart. After that night, a clear division had been made. They were still friends, but Meg had won. She had Alex for life from then on. That such an elegant, brilliant man could devote his life to such a mediocre little twig of a woman was something Michael would never understand. He would go to his grave not understanding, he was sure of it. Michael hoped he would outlive her and would someday be able to see her bones reduced to a pile of ash. Her laugh, her drawl, her half-hidden racial prejudices, her lack of intelligence, and her fixation on the silly details of life—all of those qualities were the most infuriating combination in one person.

Michael had once had the distinct displeasure of overhearing the two of them having sex. He had been standing outside Alex's dorm room, and he could hear the muffled sounds through the door. He stood and listened to the giggling and the shifting, and her high-pitched battle cries. That was not the worst of it. The worst was when Alex came—his moan was long and solemn. It was horrific for Michael to imagine that the moan was dedicated to this creature gripping her claws into his back.

Sex seemed the biggest joke in that it formed someone's entire life, sculpted the direction a life took. That those two polar opposites were joined as one was the biggest joke Michael had ever encountered in his life, worse than Nancy and him. He and Nancy were neutral, he felt—that was all. They canceled each other out and stood for nothing. Michael had had to stand to the right of Alex at his wedding as a groomsman, while the hideous Meg, sheathed in white, bejeweled in diamonds, grinned at her good fortune, this beautiful man who was pledging his eternal love to her. In the wedding photos Michael had looked sullen, to the point where Alex had made a comment about it, passed off as a joke and yet with a serious edge, when he and Meg got the prints back.

“You couldn't have sloughed off your melancholy ways for one day?”

“No, Alex, I couldn't,” he shot back, and seriousness was permanently inserted into their friendship, as if with a syringe. The comment hurt because it was true—Michael could not do that one simple thing for his friend.

A few construction workers entered the diner as day approached—he would have to leave soon. He was still drunk, but the food had grounded him a bit. He studied one of the men who sat at the counter in his workmen boots with large, speckled hands. His gold wedding band flashed on the dusty hand, and Michael imagined that the man must have a loving wife and two daughters, all of whom thought of him as their hero.

Was there a way to fix all this with his family? He had indeed done what Ryan had accused him of. He had bitten her. He could hardly remember doing it, so when she had accused him, he had denied it. She had seemed to want him to admit to it. The problem was that in sobriety, it never seemed as though it had actually happened and so
he never owned up to it. But in his drunken state, he could remember leaning over and placing his teeth gently on her neck. In that moment, he had been so relaxed that he was starting to fall asleep and did not remember who was before him or where he was. In a sober state, the memory seemed to vanish. She had stood before him, such a miraculous creation, that he felt he had to connect himself to her, and that had been his way. He was helpless to understand himself, that one decision, to take two of his pills and continue to drink, had caused him to do that bizarre thing and so to become a monster in his daughter's eyes. If he had chosen not to make another drink and take only one pill, his horrendous and baffling behavior would not have arisen in him and he would have remained a normal father, perhaps.

With the sun coming up, Michael knew he had to go back to his house. He wondered if John had spent the night. He walked back to his office from the diner. He locked the videos in a file cabinet, quickly tidied up the room, wheeled the TV/VCR into the hallway, turned out the lights, and locked his office door behind him. Downstairs, the security guard was asleep in his chair, so Michael easily slipped out and into the dawn.

He drove back in the half-light, swerving onto the shoulder every hundred feet or so. There weren't too many cars on the road on a Sunday morning at five a.m. He passed a few all-night diners and their lights were comforting, the rows and rows of empty booths lit up, waiting. He breezed through Orin, where the traffic lights were all switched to blinking yellow and blinking red.

When Michael walked through the side door, he saw that cookies had been left out on the counter for him, under a layer of plastic wrap. He paused in the living room by the stairs and checked the couch.
There was no one asleep there. He then crept up to his bedroom and soundlessly opened the door a foot. Nancy was curled up on her side of the bed. His space was empty, as if, even when she was unconscious and he absent, her body wouldn't dare move onto his side of the bed because she knew his place was not her place.

Michael knew it was a ridiculous moment. He didn't know what he had expected to find there. Maybe something would be out of the ordinary? Some change would have taken place. Why couldn't John have slept on the couch downstairs? To have a new body in the house, someone other than the four of them, would alter the atmosphere under their roof and would act as a catalyst for much-needed change. But there was nothing. John had probably left around ten or so the night before, as he should have. Nothing had happened.

Michael poked his head into Max's room and observed the sleeping form in bed. He then walked to Ryan's room and opened the door a crack. To his astonishment, he found her bed empty, neatly made up. It was after five in the morning, still dark out, and she was not home.

She's at Carol's, no big deal, he thought to calm himself. But he knew there was more to it than that. Something was going on. If Michael had known how difficult being a father was, he might never have done it. If he had been aware of the hours of agony that were involved with seeing a person go through every single stage of her life from birth through adulthood with little say in how it would work out for her, he would never have chosen to set this life in motion. Maybe Nancy had it right with religion. You could control more with that.

He got into his car and drove to the small coastal highway. He drove to Jill's house. All the lights were off. He did not see Ryan's car in the driveway. He passed the house and pulled over by the water.

There were several possibilities. Her car was in the garage, and she was asleep at Jill's. Her car was in the garage, and Jill let her have a boy stay there. Jill had always been a wild, tacky kind of hippie woman. She might let Ryan have her first time there. Or Ryan had taken her car and gone to be with someone, whom she was now with, and might be returning in the early hours to Jill's. It would be difficult for him to ascertain the exact reality. If the last option were the case, he could catch her. He could wait there and see if she drove back or emerged from the house in the morning.

Michael took out the draft of his novel from the box in his car and turned on the car light to read it. He had also stashed some pens in there and was pleased to find a red one. He pulled it out and began circling sentences that could be improved. The paragraph had begun so well: “The day was neither bold nor timid—it spun its wheels fairly and with neutrality, letting people come and go, but it could hardly have been called beautiful. It was a mild spring day and the grass was green, but it lacked that ripening, that opening that can be found on the freshest days of the season.” But then the writing trailed off into more description and became a monotonous procession of repetition. He did indeed improve it each time he reworked it, but it occurred to him that the revisions could be endless, as it never seemed finished.

The character was a man who walked around and noticed everything, and rarely interacted with other humans. Against his better judgment, he had shown a scene to Nancy, who had gushed over it, and now Michael wanted to keep the passage hidden in his own heart forever as evidence that he wasn't just cold and clinical but could move people and create a poetic scene. His character, nameless, in first person, swims in a calm river alone at night and drifts, bewitched by the stars and freed and excited by his own nakedness. But the
scene functioned independently. It was not connected to the rest of the book and was harshly beautiful in comparison to everything else he had produced.

For all his knowledge, Michael felt helpless about the idea of trying to approach an agent about his novel. He could not contact one of the two writers living on the Peninsula. He was a businessman and might be laughed at for attempting to be a novelist. He was neither a writer nor a professor. Both of those paths, if he had dedicated himself to either one, would have resulted in a stream through which he could have unleashed all the thoughts rattling around in his brain.

He tilted his seat back and let his eyes fall slightly out of focus. When he woke up it was after nine in the morning and Ryan's car was still not in sight. He drove home and parked in his driveway. All this racing around was beginning to disorient him. It was harder to remember what day it was, where he was supposed to be, and to summon the will to do the things a man of his age should do, like attend work in a normal fashion at the usual hours, use his grill, have a regularly scheduled hobby such as racquetball that he diligently showed up for.

After returning home, Michael spent the day in his study, going over bills and filing papers. His daughter was gone all day, but in the evening he heard her come in and go up to her room. When he walked past her room to his own, he heard her on the phone, laughing and talking in low tones.

Why could he not reprimand Ryan and discipline her? He felt he did not have the right; his weaknesses were so visible, and a knowing look could rouse his awareness of them all. She was stronger than he was. If he were to lay down the law, he would only be openly mocked, and he did not have the solidity or the fortitude to withstand such a confrontation. He wondered: Did she know he was crazy? Did she
know? Had Nancy told her, or had she figured it out? When he acted illogically, he was a bad parent, and when he tried to be responsible and keep his daughter safe from making bad choices with boys, he was also a bad parent. It seemed he was getting it all wrong. Was there anything he could do correctly anymore?

Michael left the hallway and entered his bedroom. He felt his head spin slightly from anger and was relieved to see Nancy reading on their bed.

“I slept at the office, Nancy.” He saw her weary face and knew she was about to respond with a snippy comment. He should give her something.

“Why don't I give you a massage, Nancy?”

“Okay,” she said in surprise and rolled over. Michael saw the curve of her back under her green silk nightgown, the same nightgown that he had bought for her years ago. She wore it as constant proof that they were indeed linked. He loved his wife, wanted to please her, but he could not help hating that they were linked for life as fucker and fuckee, and he could not escape the fact. He saw the round curve of her butt under the silk and felt a flash of arousal, which quickly faded.

He began massaging her. He gave in and moved his hands in the style that she liked, thorough and slow, but then quickened his pace, which he knew she didn't like. He worked the loose skin on her back like dough, somewhat roughly, but she didn't complain. He was aware, on some level, that she was aroused and felt himself inevitably pulled in that direction. He didn't want to be doing this, but he would do it. It was his duty. He pulled up her nightgown, exposing her thick pale legs, and he knew she was probably anxious at having her body seen. He massaged along the sides of her thighs and then pulled down her light green cotton underwear, underwear that matched the nightgown for some pathetic reason. Maybe she had been waiting for this.
He scooped his hands under her breasts and began rubbing against her.