my father said. “Compared to Triangle, Lolita is very pale matter, totally lacking in fire.”
Seana groaned.
“And what about Jules and Jim?” I said.
“Grim and gloomy stuff,” Seana declared, “and with heavy-handed thematic overlays—The Great War and all that—and without anybody ever really enjoying it.”
“It?” I asked.
“The sex,” my father said. “What’s so extraordinary about Triangle is the sheer joy the family takes in its sexual escapades, the great and uncomplicated delight in one another, and in who they truly are.”
“Shhh,” Seana said. “You’re embarrassing the author.”
By this time, Max had opened a second bottle of wine, and was telling us about how at faculty Christmas parties he’d walk up behind a colleague, tap the man or woman on the shoulder, and before the colleague could turn around, ask—“So tell me—how’s the new novel coming?”—to which the colleague would usually reply, “Almost done,” or “Coming along,” and then there’d be a double-take, and the inevitable question: “But how did you know?”
Somewhere between salad and dessert—my father’s delicious bread-pudding-with-maple-syrup—I fell asleep, and when I opened my eyes, Max was pouring more wine—we were on our third bottle—and raising a glass to my health. As to his own health, he said, he was feeling terrific—stronger than ever. He glanced down at his lap, then looked at me.
“Now I can bend it,” he said.
Seana rolled her eyes and declared this was the perfect example of the kind of shtik that had charmed his students—had made them use the word ‘puckish’ when they talked about him.
“A term I deplored,” my father said.
Seana leaned toward me: “Your father never fooled around with us—with his female students—the way the other profs did.”
“One should not shit where one eats,” my father said.
“Still,” Seana said, “there were those among us who thought it a shame.”
“There can be great pleasures in renunciation,” my father stated, after which he stood, inclined his head slightly toward Seana, and began removing dishes from the table while reminding me that, as he’d mentioned in one of his letters, he was planning a trip to his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, and that he hoped I’d join him. Perhaps Seana would come too.
Seana shrugged, said she preferred not to go home again if she could help it, thank you very much, and her face took on a look of such sudden sadness—her hazel-green eyes going to dark brown, her smile sucked inward—that I wanted to reach across the table and take her hands in mine, tell her that everything—everything!—was going to be all right. My father continued to clear the table while Seana remained where she was, immobile, so I stood and, on wobbly legs, began gathering plates and silverware.
“Please sit,” my father said, after which he announced that it was past his bedtime but that he knew we young people had things to talk about—Seana had so informed him earlier in the day—and that we should leave the rest of the dishes, along with the pots and pans, until morning.
He kissed Seana on the forehead, then came around the table, told me again how good it was to have me home, kissed me on the cheek, and asked me to give serious thought to accompanying him to Brooklyn, perhaps the following week.
“I need to go to Maine first,” I said. “To visit Nick’s parents.”
“Of course,” my father said, and reminded Seana that Nick had been a friend of mine from college who had lived in Singapore—who was responsible for my going there to work—and that Nick had died recently.
“You didn’t like him,” Seana said.
“Correct,” my father said. “I didn’t like him, although I didn’t wish him dead. I found him a somewhat hollow and manipulative young man.”
“You never told me that,” I said.
“He was your friend, not mine, and doubtless possessed qualities that made you favor him with your friendship.”
“My father’s right about that,” I said to Seana.
“Right that this guy was an ass?” Seana asked.
“Right that it was because of Nick that I went to Singapore.”
“So?” she said.
“So I’m just setting the record straight.”
“But surely your decision was not based wholly upon your friendship with Nick,” my father said.
“Not wholly,” I said.
“Good,” my father said, “because although Nick and your friendship with him were clearly crucial to your choice, what I’ve preferred to believe is that your primary reason for going to the Far East had to do with your thirst for adventure.”
“That too,” I said.
My father turned to Seana. “I’ll tell you something about my son that, given his often faux-naïf demeanor when it comes to matters intellectual, you might not suspect,” he said. “Charlie was a voracious reader when he was a boy, and the books he loved most were about faraway places with strange sounding names. When he was seven or eight, I started him off with a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy, and while other boys his age were reading The Hardy Boys or sports novels, Charlie was immersed in tales that took him on exotic journeys to the four corners of the world.”
“It’s true,” I said and, hoping to pull Seana out of her gloom, I told her about my favorite author in high school, James Ramsey Ullman, and the book reports I did on his novels—about climbing Everest, going across the Karakorum desert in China, and up and down the Amazon—along with books like Kon Tiki and Green Mansions, and before that—at about the time I was reading Bomba the Jungle Boy—the Tarzan and Doctor Dolittle books.
“When Charlie was eight years old,” my father said, “he came to me at the start of summer vacation with a question he’d been pondering. ‘Do you think,’ he asked, and in the most serious way, ‘that by the end of the summer, I’ll be old enough to go out into the world to seek my fortune?’”
“Oh my,” Seana said.
“And let us not forget Gerald Durrell,” my father said. “Charlie adored Durrell, so that when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would say he was going to be an animal trainer and work in a zoo. Gerald—Lawrence’s brother—was a zookeeper at times, you see, as well as a naturalist and environmentalist.”
“I hope he was a better writer than his brother,” Seana said. “Have you ever read those Alexandria novels? Impossibly soppy. Soppy, sloppy, soggy—over-written, noxious, romantic, pretentious…”
“But what don’t you like about them?” my father asked, though when he smiled
