Good Kids: A Novel (25 page)

It was then that the engine made a sound that communicated, to some intuitive organ in each of us capable of interpreting the protestations of machines, that it was helplessly sick, and wanted us to know it was going to die. It let out a parched screech that descended slowly, operatically, to a nauseated growl. It was the most human sound I had ever heard from an expensive car.
Brothers,
it said,
I am melting.
It faded quickly into near silence.

“This is fascinating,” my father said. “I mean, we
were
supposed to put oil in the engine.” The floor beneath our feet began to quake. “Allison was being a little hysterical about it. She’s hysterical, as a tendency, sometimes.”

I stared at him. Even stoned, he could read the question on my face: Had he cheated?

“She and I are doing fine,” he said. “Being responsible to your partner comes a little easier at this age.” He threw the roach into the road. “The proper course now is to reach a gas station before the
Hindenburg
here bursts into flames and the two of us burn in a German car. That’d be an ironic death for a nice Judeo-Hibernian lad like yourself.”

“Is that irony?” I asked. Even under the present circumstances, it was thrilling to correct him.

“I’m not quite sure that I’ve retained my faculties with regard to literary distinctions right now,” he said. We were moving slowly, down an exit ramp. The grass was unruly on either side. Postwar houses rose before us, uniform in shape, modest in size,
painted shoot green, deep tan, every shade of decent stationery. We came to a stop at the same moment the car ceased its muttering altogether. A man sitting on his porch began to speak to us in Italian, his hands stroking his belly.

“Inglese?” my father asked.

At this, a tall, skinny man wearing glasses and overalls emerged on a porch on the other side of the street. He had gray curls, little, silvery granny glasses, and lawns of salt-and-pepper hair on his shoulders.

“This guy doesn’t speak English,” he called to my father. He said something dismissive to his nonanglophone neighbor in Italian. “Your car is smoking, sir?”

My father parked the convertible in front of the man’s house. I grabbed the backpack and vaulted out as he idled the engine and guided the roof back into place. Once my father had turned the engine off and the smoke had stopped billowing, the man gave us lemonade in his yard while we waited for the tow.

The man’s son was visiting. He was my age, short and fair with a braided ponytail, a first-year in med school. He was his father’s pride—you could tell by the way the old man’s gaze tracked him from his perch on the stoop, as he poured us seconds of lemonade from an orange cooler, and brought them to us with a physician’s air of significance and concern. They gave no indication that they noticed my father was stoned. They seemed to see before them a mild and gentle man who thanked them profusely and remarked on the beauty of the park and the trees, who told them that this landscape was making a profound impression on him and that he was seriously considering a move from Tribeca to a neighborhood like this one, in which to raise two more children with his wife. They agreed it was a good idea.

“Excuse me, friends,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I’m a proud dad and I need to brag. My son here is a musician.” There was sun shining on his beard, and the wavering leaves made patterns on his forehead. “He wrote part of a song that was on a Pepsi commercial.” His smile was real. “It was broadcast in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.”

The tow truck came and dragged the MG to a repair shop. We walked a half mile to one of the northernmost outposts of the 4 train, where the wooden platform was speckled with fangs of glass. My father stared down at the platform and tilted his head, like a curious boy.

“Am I just stoned?” he asked. “Or is this subway platform beautiful?”

The possibility of deflating him was too seductive. “You’re stoned,” I said. I immediately regretted it. His face collapsed.

“You mean it’s not beautiful?” He shrugged. “Ah well. I’ll stay up here and see what can be done for Allison’s car. It has sentimental value for her, I believe. But don’t wait for me, Son.”

“I might as well hop on a train.” My voice was colder than I’d intended. I was too focused on falafel in Boston to see that the convertible’s death had been my opportunity to mend fences with my father. We might have fixed the natural bond between us that had begun to fray in Gaia Foods. We might have talked about the new-kids concept, had a calmer, seated discussion, over a pizza in New Haven. I could have explained the delay to Khadijah; she would have thought it was sweet of me to lend my stoned father a hand with a car. Instead I rode the 4 train back to Manhattan. I climbed the stairs at Grand Central, rode Metro-North to Stamford. Rented a squash-shaped yellow Daewoo from the Stamford Avis. Some part of me knew that the breakup with Julie was going to become real to me soon, and that if I could keep moving—keep pursuing—the moment it struck me would be delayed.

It was only outside Bridgeport that I realized I still had my father’s backpack. It might have had his wallet in it, or something else, experience suggested, that was very much private property. As I drove with my left hand, I searched in it with my right, unable to stop myself. First I fished out a Ziploc bag of joints, and then a manila envelope full of something slightly heavier than paper.

Because I was running late, now, it was only when I was waiting in line at the Mass Pike toll that I opened the envelope. The
Polaroids were not of my father and a school chum; they were twelve-, thirteen-year-old pictures of my father and Nancy. Never posed together, they had taken pictures of each other rather than allow an interloper to photograph the two of them. In three shots the cabin loomed behind them. In two more the Berkshire Hills, in another the dunes of the Cape. I thought of Khadijah and me, by the Watts Towers.

Seeing a sick friend from the college days: a typical Linus Paquettian lie. But there was some Truth with a capital
T
in his story about the man on death’s door. Nancy was a companion from the past who was mostly memory to him now, and she would be gone for good if he had another set of children. Like the mortally sick, she was fading. I could see my father’s plan: Arrive at her office with memories in a sack; wrest her away from her new life for an afternoon; keep the central tale of his life alive another few years.

I thought of my father reaching for the icicle in front of him, and I thought of him reaching out and giving the envelope of old pictures to Nancy, and I thought of the napkins in my pocket, Tom, Myra, Julie 2. I knew this was important, somehow; but the tollbooth was upon me, and it was time to take my ticket from the machine, to make up time on the Pike. I had an appointment with a goddess from my childhood, Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn.

I
was a proud son of Massachusetts, but I’d forgotten what Cambridge was like. Packs of cars drew me in, enslaved me, husbanded me into tunnels. I pined for the straightforward hell of the freeway system, pounded the neck of the Daewoo’s meek little steering wheel. After two involuntary trips down Storrow Drive, I shot past Khadijah before I spotted her, and realized that I was on Bow Street, our agreed-upon meeting place. She was able to dodge across an alley I faintly remembered for a store with hand-cranked ice cream and wave me toward a crooked little lozenge of asphalt wedged between a Harvard memorabilia shop and an institute dedicated to the prevention of nuclear war. Here, I was allowed to stop long enough for her to get in the Daewoo.

She toppled into the passenger seat dressed, I noted with joy, for something grander than food truck fare. She wore a green corduroy dress that rounded her body, and a purple cardigan that made her look plumed, a lost tropical bird.

From the beginning, our attempts to reach the falafel truck were dependent on her Bostonian’s intuition for the landscape. My cell phone, which had a map feature, had run out of batteries way back on the 84.

“It’s perverse I don’t know how to drive through this city,” she apologized. “I’ve never lived anywhere but Wattsbury or Boston, so I’ve never needed to drive.”

We decided to perform a pageant for the truck’s proprietor that would make our need for directions understandable.

“My husband and I,” she explained into her cell phone, prim, as if to a maître d’, “are from Des Moines, and we are very excited to eat your Middle Eastern food, and we are crossing some sort of bridge from Cambridge into Boston”—indeed, we were on a thoroughfare that led up to a bridge across the Charles and into a thicket of skyscrapers. “And we’re having a little bit of difficulty finding you, so perhaps you could give us some instructions?” I got the sense, from the helpless sounds coming through her phone, that there were language issues. Brown leaves twisted in the air and flew up throttled roads, down the riverbanks. There was a half of my heart loyal to Julie that saw a black Lethe as I drove over the bridge.
Do not think of Julie or you will die,
spooled my mantra.
Do not think of Julie or you will die
.

Now that we were in Back Bay, Khadijah pointed us in what must have been the correct general direction and named the streets we were on as I drove. I turned over the words
Jamaica Plain
in my mind, as if to will us there. Absent a map, a higher power than human reason asserted itself. Massachusetts required faith of its returning children. We did reach the legendary truck eventually, but it was battening down the grates over its windows by the time we arrived. We sat in the car, trying to decide what to do. Now that conspicuously informal eating was no longer an option, what would our pact allow?

I reached into the backseat for the envelope and tossed the photos of my father and Nancy into Khadijah’s lap.

She shuffled through them, holding them up to the streetlamp light through the window. “They’re kids,” she observed. “I mean compared to how they are now. Look at their faces! They don’t have the faintest clue what they’re getting into.”

“Look,” I said. “Do you want to just have dinner? There are no public places to go that aren’t restaurants. I know we made a rule, but no one deserves to go hungry.”

It’s possible that if we had tried harder we could have found a place less violating of our agreement than the tiny Italian restaurant with checkered tablecloths that stood two blocks west of the truck. We might have found the fortitude not to order wine.

“My dad always used to take me to places like this when my mom was late at the office and she wasn’t around to tell him not to spend money,” she said. She encircled the base of a flaking candlestick with her index fingers.

“Did it freak you out that he treated you so much more licentiously?” I was hungry for her confessions. I wanted us to be close, and the way I knew to create closeness was to induce her to describe her own suffering.

She shrugged. “Maybe my dad is gay. Wow, that just occurred to me. Well, no, it’s occurred to me before. But I don’t really think he is. It’s more just I think about the education he gave me, and it’s essentially a fabulousness-based curriculum. After the divorce, he paid my mom to send me to Paris for two summers. The family he embedded me with had these three teenage daughters who were walking ads for France, and I was an American teenager with my backpack and my sneakers. They left me entirely to my own devices. I was incredibly depressed, but I didn’t know this was what depression was, I thought this was just life, that life was this little, wet grove. I didn’t have much concept of how to obtain food; I had this barely adequate allowance, and I didn’t know what to eat except to go get another crêpe. I went to every museum in Paris, but I could have become a prostitute. Whereas my mother, hoo boy. She gave me a Sufi name and then raised me to be the Anti-Sufi. I mean, I was not allowed to go through a fuckup phase, ever. Maybe I’ll go through a fuckup phase now.”

Envy washed over me. To be overdirected by a parent, made to live according to a parent’s image . . . To have one’s parent expend a disturbing
excess
of money and attention to make you turn out just so. And envy and love are close cousins; I wanted to hold her. I had that familiar sensation from early childhood of loving a baby chick or a tiny dog so much that I insisted on clutching it to my chest even on the swing set, until it fell from my hands and hit the grass.

“Do you still feel depressed?” I asked. I was dimly aware of a hazardous dynamic forming, in which I was more a therapist than I usually was and she was in all likelihood more a patient
than she usually was. But my appetite for her confessions had been whetted.

“I am whole,” she said. “I’m just sick of being an intellectual. Is it boring to say that? Is it clichéd?”

“Not to me. I don’t know any intellectuals.”

“What are you actually doing? Why did you come here? This anarchy-stone thing . . . You ended things with this person I met, Julie?”

“We’re done. Parents informed.”

She took an absentminded gulp of her wine. “Where do you live?”

“Homeless,” I said proudly. In the universe of musicians, this implied a certain sensuality of lifestyle, a seriousness with regard to one’s career.

“So, what are you like?”

“Basically flexible. Shapeshifter ha ha. I was thinking of becoming a recording engineer and building people’s studios. Like in Greater Boston. I’d be good at that. And I’ve been writing songs again. Tell me something.” I, too, did some damage to my first glass. “What’s it like working hard at something and having it work out? Being like, Oh, people are asking me to do this homework, guess I’ll do it, and then becoming a professor? My career has been, you get a bunch of drug addicts together and put instruments in their hands, and you drag them out of bed to practice as their girlfriends throw cat toys at your head, and then you play a show and somebody puts a couple twenties in your hand and says sorry it’s not what we promised, we didn’t get the free case that Heineken promised us for putting the Heineken banner behind you as you played, and then you spend all your money to make a demo in a basement and then a record label is like, Here’s a contract, and you make a record in a deluxe studio, and they don’t do anything they said they’d do to promote it, or pay you the royalties, and then the drug addicts are demoralized and won’t get out of bed anymore, and no longer even have girlfriends to throw cat toys at you, and move back to wherever they’re from, and then Pepsi starts shooting money out of its ass
at you. Or it seems like an ass-ton of money because you’ve been living on Pall Malls and Subway. So you spend a lot of it going out to eat. Then you’re twenty-eight, and your hair starts to fall out.” I refreshed her glass.