“What happened?” I asked.
John simply looked at me again, wishing I would go away. “Nothing,” he said.
Then he went to the big bay window and touched the sides of his pants, perhaps searching for a cigar.
“You’re going to see your father.”
That night he called.
“I’m coming to get you,” he said. “Friday night.” After which he paused, then said, in a half whisper, “It’s okay now.”
But was it? In the way he spoke, there was the inference that our world, his and mine, was going to be restored, and that it was the only world that counted. But close to me, in the family room, my mother made her presence known, in small ways, by moving her legs on the couch.
“What would you like to do, Luca?” my father asked, from whatever room or bar he might be calling from.
“I don’t care,” I said.
Again, my mother had moved, as if she were following the conversation through the movements of her legs and arms.
“Maybe I can just, show you how I’m living now,” he said. “Maybe that would be enough for a start.”
“Okay.”
He giggled. I knew it was just his nervousness speaking, though at first it cut me in a tender place.
“Your mother and you been doing okay?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t call because of, well, because of complicated reasons.”
“It’s okay.”
He held a long pause.
“Friday night,” he repeated.
When our conversation was over, I watched television with my mother for a while, out of politeness and a sense of impending and necessary desertion. She was watching Naked City. She favored police shows, doctor shows, anything featuring large and burly males moving heavily through the world, knocking obstacles from their paths. When the commercial came on, I spoke. “He says he’s coming to get me Friday.”
“I called his work,” she said abruptly. “I told on him. I told them what he was.”
I could see only the back of her head, the slightly mad way her hair sprawled upward, and her arm lay as if in readiness to pat her hair down.
“That’s why he’s coming, Luca.” She touched her hair then, and continued watching the show.
Of course I understood something, though maybe not in the way of words. I understood that my father had made a charge outward, into the world beyond this world, and that this charge had always been coming, he had been preparing for it a long time. Our coming here, our ascension, the finishedness of this neighborhood itself—had been, I knew, a catalyst.
But when he came, I thought right away that he looked silly. He had fallen away from a standard, and it was only at his appearance that I understood how, in his absence, I had allied myself with Meola and Semenza, and with my Uncle John, the men who stood beneath the high archways of their doors and surveyed the world.
He was wearing a hat, but not a suit. Instead, a soft cotton shirt, buttoned to the neck. He stood beside the Fairlane, waiting.
Uncle John had come for the occasion. My mother had packed me food in a bag.
“Don’t be silly, Dorothy,” John had said when she’d handed me the bag, and my mother answered, “There might not be food there.” Because so little had been said, every word carried an enormous, terrifying weight. There. Where were we going?
Behind me, as my father stood waiting, in the foolish hat, John had his hands on my shoulders, and I could practically feel his belligerence. It was only because John’s anger seemed so oversized that I was able to sympathize with my father even a little, to move an inch beyond my absorption in this new world of ours to wonder what lesser world my father had chosen, instead, to inhabit. John’s hands tightened on my shoulders and he forced me out the door.
My father smiled. I thought how I must look to him, standing before the door with my shoulders high, as though John were still gripping them, and with the bag of food in my hands. It was like I had become, in the time of his absence, a kind of girl.
“Let me look at you,” he said.
So I went down the steps. He made a great show of circling my body. He touched my arms. “Okay,” he said, as if he’d just had a thought, something secret, something he wouldn’t tell me. He glanced once at the house to find John still watching him in a leaning-forward, aggressive manner that made him seem all pointy, rodentlike head. Then he looked around the neighborhood and seemed glad to be back. “I see they moved in,” he said. “Down the street.”
“Yes.”
“And tell me. Do they … associate with you? With John? Are there … block parties, and such?”
“No,” I said.
He looked down the street. “No, I didn’t think so. Come on.”
We got in the car, and he kept looking at me as if waiting for the conversation to start, as if it were up to me. He turned the radio on but seemed not to find anything interesting there.
“What’s in the bag?” he asked.
I still held it, stupidly, in my lap.
“Mom made me something to eat.”
He looked, briefly, angry. “Put it in the back, Luca.”
I did, and then it was as if he regretted getting angry. “So? School started? Eighth grade?”
“Yes.”
His voice was soft, but he knew how to put insistence into it. “And?”
A great many things had in fact happened in the first three days of school. Mr. McCluskey, the gym teacher, had let down the ropes that hung from the ceiling of the gym and announced that by the end of the fall we were all going to have to climb them. A shudder had passed through the group of us. Then a boy named Andrew Weston had gotten a hard-on in the shower, and that had made us all forget the ropes. Everyone already knew things about Andrew Weston—the secret, vague things you could know about boys, the malformed boys who were part of every class. There were others: David Campbell, Alan Carney. Mr. McCluskey had come into the shower room and put his hands on Andrew’s shoulders and led him out. While the rest of us dressed, Mr. McCluskey sat in the gym office with Andrew and stared out through the Plexiglas at us, his mouth hard and straight, cautioning us not to say anything. Andrew had not come to our next class. Someone said his mother had come to get him.
That was not all. Karen Meola was in all my classes. We didn’t speak. I looked at her fingernails, and thought, in a silence that seemed to me enormously loud and significant: I watched you paint them. There was a power to standing outside, to knowing things about people they didn’t know you knew, that I had just begun to
