Blake raised his glass as Nicole escorted the professor from the room. He was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, shin exposed, clutching his scepter of gin, leering as if remembering me in diapers. I was waiting for him to start in with some sort of your-father-once-told-me comment—but he didn’t. He seemed perfectly comfortable keeping silent.
“So. You’re an old friend of my father?”
“That I am, yes.”
“Retired?”
“Right again.”
Nicole and the professor were talking in low tones by the front door. Blake was clearly aware that he was the subject of their conversation and, as some people do who know themselves to be unwelcome, settled back into his chair in an attitude of graceful quiet. I was sitting at the long dining table across the room, fidgeting. The front door closed as Nicole bade the professor good-bye. Rather than join us, she went back into the kitchen.
“So, where are you living these days?” Blake asked.
I ignored the question. “My father didn’t have many friends.”
Blake swished his gin.
“You say you’re an old friend?” I pressed on.
“I think he would have put me in that category.”
“I don’t remember him ever mentioning you.”
He frowned into his glass. “What can I say? He was the soul of discretion, your father was.”
“You aren’t surprised?”
“Surprised? By what?”
“That I have no idea who you are.”
Blake took it in very calmly, then tossed back the remainder of his drink and glanced in silent debate with himself at the bottle on the side table. The vulnerability in his look softened me somewhat. I hadn’t meant to attack the man, but I had no patience for the mysterious-stranger game he was playing. I didn’t give a damn. The parlor aspect of the last decade of my father’s life had worn thin. Since his retirement, the string of people who had trailed through this apartment could have stretched around the block. I don’t remember when I began to find their eccentric friends and busy social life depressing, but I’d seen enough of the comings and goings during my visits to know better than to attach significance to anyone claiming deep friendship. Observing Blake as he reached for the bottle, I was struck by a weird irony. It was true that my father had never had any close friends. He was the type who would sit back and watch things unfold with a kind of wistful absorption that suggested an interest in, but not much time for, intimacy. The superficiality of the acquaintanceships that gathered around him made the appearance of someone claiming intimate friendship both impossible and curious. There was an error in the poor man’s perception that was to be pitied, not exposed. I felt sorry for him. “Can I get you some ice?” I asked.
“Sure, if you’ve got it.” As I left the room, he called after me, “An olive would be lovely, too. If you’ve got it.”
It was a familiar errand and took the charge out of the atmosphere. As a Foreign Service brat, I’d grown up around the protocols of cocktails and drinking. Nicole was putting things away in the kitchen. “What did he tell you?” she asked.
“What is there to tell?” I took out the ice and the olives, expecting her to put some sort of time limit on the continued hospitality. But she didn’t. She followed me back into the living room, where Blake was now sitting with his chin on his chest. His head jerked up as we entered. I handed him a fresh glass with ice and olives. He peered into it with drunken ceremony and said, “I’m not big in the friend department, either. Your father was the best one I ever had.”
Nicole sat down, lit another cigarette, and swept away a loose strand of hair with the back of her hand. Her dislike was now as unpleasant as his presence. I felt a pang of shame for the seedy atmosphere that had overtaken the room. It wasn’t just Blake. It was also Nicole, distraughtly puffing away at her cigarettes, the disorder of the apartment, the dreary winter weather, the shabbiness of lives foreshortened by cocktails and weltschmerz. I found myself wishing for a different setting, a different cast of characters, people who didn’t pretend to know everything and who hadn’t come into my father’s life—and mine—so lately. Best of all would have been to go back to less sophisticated times, when everyone felt a little less secure of their place in the world. I was sorry and sad to see how it all had come to this.
“Nicole asked you not to come,” I said.
Blake let the statement hang for a moment, then put his glass on the side table and sighed. “Yes. That’s right, she did.”
I looked at Nicole, who took a final puff from her cigarette, crushed it into the ashtray, and said, “No harm done.”
Blake accepted this with a gracious little bow.
“I’ll go see about the taxi,” she said and got up to leave.
“I can’t help it if she doesn’t like me,” Blake said when she was out of the room. “But I wasn’t not going to come, my boy. I was never not going to come.”
The patronizing tone demolished whatever sincerity he may have intended—and my sympathy as well. “You seem fairly accustomed to being unwelcome,” I said.
Blake threw back his head and roared with laughter. It was spontaneous at first, but then he went on for too long and played it up, flourishing a handkerchief, wiping his watery eyes. “Your father told me you had a funny streak.” He wiped his eyes again and shook his head. “Truer words were never spoken. You have no idea.” He leaned to one side and stuffed the kerchief into his trouser pocket. I noticed he was far less steady than he let on, noticed also that what substance he had was made up entirely of puff and bloat, the sort of man who hides his infirmities in tailored suits and expensive cars, who is somehow finished in his being without ever having gotten started.
Nicole returned. “The taxi is here.”
Blake rose slowly from the chair, regarded me with squint-eyed appraisal. “Lead the way.”
I escorted him to the door, turned on the stairway light. He gripped the banister, took the steps carefully, one at a time. It occurred to me that I would never see him again, and I called down, “Mind if I ask you one last question?”
He descended the final few steps.
“Where did you meet my father?”
He put a hand in his trouser pocket, stood there jingling his change for a moment as if waiting for something to sink in. “It was in Laos. Yes. That’s right. We met in Laos.” Then, with a little wave, he left.
I could hear the idling taxi, the opening and closing of doors. The timer of the stairway light shut off with a loud snap as the taxi drove away. I lingered in the semidarkness for a moment. A faint light from the apartment shone through the stained-glass window set into the door. There was something oddly comfortable in being guest and host in this place where I was both foreign and at home. Nicole called from the kitchen, “I’ll fix you a tea.”
Potomac Street
38°55’34.46”N
