The house itself, of which only the roof and third-floor dormer still stood above the pine trees, was unusual in having a half-circular living room and, directly above, a half-circular master bedroom. These rooms, plus the dining room and front porch, belonged to Melanie. She kept them reasonably neat, and visitors to the house never saw the Bronze Age kitchen or the Stone Age basement, where there were piles of laundry whose bottom strata dated from the mid-1970s. Bob stayed mainly in his study, which was the only room on the third floor. Nowadays, for months at a stretch, the children’s rooms were visited by nothing but airborne dust. The doors were always open, though, exposing the furnishings like the unburied dead—granting them no rest.
As Louis came up Davis Street from the El stop a dry wind from the west was blowing in his face. The flat, unwatered lawns were as brown now in June as they used to be in August. House after house stood deserted-looking in a deep post-graduation silence, a desolation which the charcoal smoke creeping around from one solitary family’s back yard made all the more complete.
It was cooler among his father’s pine trees. Yellow beams slanted through suspended yellow pollen, the sun hanging in the branches as if it hadn’t moved in twenty years. The smell of resin was sharp and suppressive of insect motion. (Melanie often said she felt like she lived in a cemetery.) Taped to the front door was a message in Bob’s hand that said
Louis, I’m at the Jewel
.
He went straight upstairs to his room, dropped his bag, and fell down on the waiting bed, overcome by the heat and the lifelessness of the neighborhood and the fact that he was home. He didn’t know why he’d let himself come home. He shut his eyes, wondering, Why, why, why, as if the word alone could carry him over the next five days to the moment his return flight left. But the thought of the return flight led to the thought of Boston. He rolled onto his stomach, pulling at his face with his hands. He tried to think of something, anything, that had made him happy in the past, but no trace of pleasure remained from the days he’d spent with Lauren, and although there was something about Renée that had had some happiness attached, it was nothing he could remember now.
Telephones rang. Mechanically he rose and answered in his parents’ bedroom.
“Louis?” Lauren said. She sounded next door. “I miss you.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m in Atlanta, at the airport. Did you have a good trip?”
“No.”
“Louis, I was thinking, I just had this thought. You know how you said you couldn’t see living in this country? Well, I was thinking we really could go to some island. We could both work and save some money, and we could go and start a restaurant or something. Just the two of us. We could have some kids, and go to the beach, and then we’d work in the restaurant.” She paused, awaiting a response. “It sounds so stupid when I say it, but it’s not stupid. We really could. I’ll be everything for you, and anywhere we go is fine with me.”
Louis listened to the breath coming out of his nose at regular intervals.
“You think it’s stupid,” Lauren said.
“No. No, it sounds nice.”
“You didn’t want me to call.”
“It’s OK.”
“No, I’m going to hang up right now and not call anymore. I’m sorry. Just pretend I didn’t call. Will you promise to pretend I didn’t call?”
“Really, it’s OK.”
“The other thing I wanted to say”—she lowered her voice—“is I want to make love with you. I really, really, really want to. I wanted to say I’m sorry we didn’t when we had a chance. As soon as I was on the plane I started crying because we hadn’t. And now”—her voice was becoming squeaky—“now I don’t know if we ever will. Louis, I mess everything up, don’t I. When I’m with you, I’m so happy, I try to have everything be
perfect
. But when I’m alone—when I’m alone I only want things your way.”
There was a very long pause, with respiratory sounds at either end of the line.
“Be tough,” Louis said.
“OK. Goodbye.”
He wanted to be off the phone, but he hated the sound of this “goodbye.” The word accused him of not loving her. If he loved her, wouldn’t he tell her not to say goodbye yet?
“’Bye,” he said.
“All right,” Lauren said, hanging up. Another charge had registered on her credit card.
Having heard the modest but penetrating ticking of a ten-speed’s freewheel in the driveway, he went down to the kitchen and found his father unstrapping a knapsack from his back.
“Hi Dad.”
“Howdy, Lou, welcome home.”
There was no sign of any $22 million in the kitchen. The linoleum was still torn in front of the sink and back door, the fruit bowl still held, as always, one moribund banana and one obese and obviously mealy apple, there was still the same archaic dishwasher with the words worn off its buttons and dried drools of detergent below the leaky door, still the dirty windows with the storms on, cobwebs and pine needles in the corners, still the old drainer with its rusty ulcerations, still the economy-size bottle of generic dish soap with a pink crust around its nozzle, and still the old father, nattering in his mildly entertaining way about the local drought and its probable global causes. Bob was dressed like a lawn-care-service employee—cuffed blue stay-press trousers, Sears work shoes, and a Greenpeace T-shirt dark with perspiration. Louis watched with an irritation verging on contempt as the man crouched womanishly by the refrigerator and transferred vegetables from the knapsack to the crisper. The beers on the top shelf were still Old Style. Louis took one, reaching over the hair that would now always be thicker than his own, smelling the armpits to which deodorants had long been strangers.
“You forgot to take your ankle clip off,” he said.
Bob touched his pants leg, noting that the clip was there, but he didn’t take it off. He smoothed the emptied knapsack and folded it in two.
Louis looked around the kitchen as if it were a witness to what he had to put up with.
“Well so here I am,” he said. “You want to tell me why you sent the ticket?”
“So you couldn’t hang up on me,” Bob said.
“Expensive way to do that. Or is money no object now?”
“If you’re worried about that, you can paint the garage for me. And scrape it first. But no, if you want to be strictly logical, there’s no reason for you to be here. There’s no reason for me to care if I see you unhappy, no reason why you and your mother shouldn’t keep making each other miserable and poison the whole family.”
Louis rolled his eyes, again calling upon the kitchen as his witness. “I take it she’s already in Boston.”
“She left on Thursday.”
“It’s nice how she always lets me know when she’s there.”
“Yes, I know she doesn’t call you. But the fact is you wouldn’t want to see her now anyway.”
“Uh-huh.” Louis nodded. “That’s very considerate of her. She knows I’m not going to want to see her, so she spares me the awkwardness of saying no to an invitation. That’s so amazingly tactful.”
“Lou, this is why I wanted you here.”
“‘This’? ‘This’? This—what, attitude problem of mine? This failure of my niceness regarding Mom?” He swallowed some beer and made a face. “How can you drink this stuff? It’s carbonated gallbladder.”
“I thought you might
want
to come,” Bob said, determined not to be provoked. “You’re obviously very angry, and I thought if you understood better why your mother, for example, is behaving the way she is—”
“Then I’d understand and accept and forgive her. Right?” Louis dared his father to contradict him. “You’d tell me what a tough life Mom has, and what a tough life Eileen has, and what a comparatively easy life I have, and then because it turns out I’ve got things so good I’d go and say, Gee, Mom,
I’m
sorry, do whatever you want, I totally understand.”
“No, Louis.”
“But what I don’t understand is where everybody gets this idea that I’ve got things so easy. You live in this house with her, you see her every day, but you can’t say to her, Jeez, Melanie, aren’t you being kind of mean to
Louis?
Instead you’ve got to fly me home, so
I
can be the one who understands.”
“Lou, she understands, but she can’t help herself.”
“Yeah, well, I can’t help myself. And that’s why I’m not going to have anything more to do with her. She can’t help it, I can’t help it, that’s the end of it.”
“But you
can
help it.”
“What, oh, because why?” he asked the kitchen generally. “Because I was elected at age ten to be Mr. Understanding? Because men have things easy?”
“That’s part of it, yes.”
“I’m the one who has things easy? Not Mom who can do whatever the hell she wants and then say she can’t help it? Not Eileen who, you know,
cries
whenever she can’t have what she wants? Are you serious? That’s such total arrogance. I’m saying I’m no better than they are. What’s wrong with that?”
“What exactly is your problem with her?”
“My problem with her . . . I’m not even going to tell you what my problem is.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t feel like it.”
“Because you’re embarrassed. Because you know it isn’t worthy of you.”
“Oh, I see. Tell me more about this problem of mine.”
Bob always savored any lecture invitation. He picked up the black banana and, holding it before his eyes, slowly stripped it. “Maybe it’s the old romance of the left,” he said in his musing, classroom voice. “I tend to think of you and Eileen as sort of the two sides of the national equation. Eileen being the kind of person who thinks she needs wealth and luxury, and you being the kind of person who—”
“Who says hell no, beans and rice are fine with me.”
“Yes, you can laugh at me now, but that’s how it seemed.” Bob began to eat the banana; no one else in the family would have touched such a black one. “I thought you felt more or less the way I do. And I used to believe there was a sizable class of people in this country who wanted nothing more than a decent job, decent housing, decent health care, and first-class non-material satisfactions. Because it seemed as if people
should
be like this. And then in the eighties this turns out to be as wishful as all my other thinking. The decent working people in this country turn out to have the same consumer greed as the bourgeoisie, and every single person is dreaming of having the same luxuries that Donald Trump has, and would poison the world and kill his neighbors to get them if that would help.”
“Oh,” Louis said. “So I’m greedy. I’m a Donald Trump just like everybody else. That’s my problem with Mom: I want a snazzy town house just like Eileen’s, and I want my VCR and my BMW and I’m pissed at Mom because she won’t give it to me. That’s what you’ve determined?”
“You’re angry because she’s lent money to Eileen.”
“Yeah, even if that were the problem, which I don’t really grant, the thing is it’s a
fairness
thing, a
frankness
thing. I mean, your working class wouldn’t care about BMWs if they didn’t have to see all these worthless rich assholes driving them around and talking on their car phones. And before you say it—I’m not saying Eileen’s a worthless rich asshole. I’m not saying I necessarily even have a problem with her.”
“No,” Bob said, tranquilly finishing the banana. “You just see an opportunity to torment your mother and still have justice on your side.”
“Me? Are you kidding? I’m trying to stay away from her! I’m trying to shut her out of my mind! Which is
literally
what she asked me to do. She said, let’s pretend this didn’t happen, and what do you think I’ve been trying to do? You know—in my own stupid trusting way. I don’t know where you get this idea I’m tormenting her. I went and talked to her
one time
, when I found out that I was the only one being asked to pretend this didn’t happen, I mean, that Eileen wasn’t. I had one five-minute lapse, and that was it. And now you tell me you ‘hoped’ I might not be as ‘materialistic’ as Eileen. Well . . . maybe I wasn’t! Maybe I was this perfect, greedless guy you always wanted me to be. But I get no thanks from anyone, and then you give me this little talk about how ‘disappointed’ you are, and how innocent you were, and how I’m like the working class that never seems to do what the marxists want it to. I mean, it’s no wonder us workers all turn out wishing we could be Donald Trump.
We’re sorry you’re disappointed
. You think I want to disappoint you? When the only possible justification I have for living this stupid fucking way I live is that maybe at least my father thinks it’s not so stupid? But you obviously can’t see this, because you obviously don’t have the slightest idea what I’m really like, because for twenty-three years you’ve been too stoned to notice. You talk about innocent, you talk about dumb, look at
me
here.”
Bob’s eyes had widened suddenly, as if he’d felt a knife go in his back. Louis, taking deep breaths, dropped his eyes to the floor. “And you’re hurt, I know, I’m sorry. It was an exaggeration.”
“No, you’re right,” Bob said as he turned towards the door. “You hit the nail on the head.”
“Yeah, walk away now, would you. Make me feel like the invulnerable one, huh? Like the only person in this family who doesn’t get overcome with grief and guilt.”
“I have nothing more to say now.”
“You walk away. Mom walks away. Eileen walks away. What else am I supposed to think except that
I’m
the one with the problem?—That I’m always so fucking right? Is that it?” He was speaking to an empty doorway.
“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. What am I doing wrong?
”
He listened to the creak of wooden stairs. “
AREN’T YOU GLAD I CAME HOME?
”
♦
Bob Holland had come from a small town north of Eugene, Oregon. In the East, at Harvard, he’d written his doctoral dissertation on the origins of land speculation in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and met Melanie, whom he began to stalk relentlessly but didn’t succeed in capturing until he’d returned to Boston from a two-year post-doctoral stint in England, at the University of Sheffield. The young Hollands came to Evanston in the early sixties and conceived Eileen the same month Bob was offered tenure. For a few years he was the history department’s shining star, teaching hugely popular courses on Colonial America and nineteenth-century industrialization, giving exams with questions like
Describe what might have been
or
Was it progress?
, and bestowing A’s and B’s on all comers. He grew marijuana in planters on the roof, turned his lawn into a jungle, rode buses to Washington. Student activists caucused in his basement. He was teargassed and spent a night in jail, once.