But despite these interesting words that I hadn’t realized I remembered, my wife and I were still repeating our circular routines. I didn’t, therefore, know if we would all move on. It was time for Liz to go to bed.
You’ve done that a lot, said my wife. Walked out of the room when I was talking.
If I’d only been conscious of it, I said, I could have thought about it. My wife knew when I was reaching for a joke; she did not know that I had attained a thought—that marriage is putting two people face-to-face slightly off.
A last drink of water, my wife said. That was one dream. In the dream she brought Chuck a last drink of water as if he was her husband. She was a long time reaching it to him. He kept looking at her while he reached for the glass, and he was still looking into her eyes when he had it in his hands, his last drink of water, and brought it to his mouth so slowly she wanted to yell at him. But then she saw the water was all cloudy and she knew she was afraid he would get up and take a walk because it was his last drink of water and she saw the cloud was her, it was her in the glass, her exactly. He was about to drink the water with her in it. He had his eyes on her, not on the glass which was at his lips. She called to him not to drink. He didn’t hear, of course. He was looking into her eyes. He didn’t hear. We were sitting in the sauna. That was one dream she told him. But—not to wake up exactly, which would be crass—she wasn’t dreaming; and the dream was what really happened.
She made it up, I said.
There’s a remote possibility, my wife said, that she made it up as what really happened, but you are crazy, my wife said, did you know that? The woman is a scientist, she’s made it, what do you mean she made it up, you’re crazy. I mean it.
Mommy…, said Liz, staring at the TV, something in voice.
Well, I, I said, am not a stay-at-home like the black philosopher Chuck.
You’re not all that bad at it, my wife said, but why did you say “black”?
Why do you want to know? I said.
Daddy…, said Liz.
My wife’s eyes gazed at me.
I said, Sorry, kid, I thought we were getting somewhere.
Do not call me kid, said my wife.
I was addressing my daughter, I said.
Do not call me kid, said Liz, looking at the TV.
In one turning pull, she switched it on, turning off the sound.
If he drank her, did she wake up inside him? I said. The devouring male, I said.
The other way round, said my wife.
What? said our sly zombie of a kid whom I sometimes wonder if I reach or am like anymore.
She woke up outside him? I said.
No, she woke up and he was inside her.
Mommy! said Liz.
This one, I said, you’re going to make up.
You don’t understand that I’m telling you something, said my wife, and left the room.
Hey, wait a second, I called, you’re still in the sauna, so these are communicating dreams, that’s good, look let’s go over to the church, oh no it’s Tuesday night, Charlie practices Mondays, let’s finish our game from last week, oh the board got put away, let’s tune up both our derailleurs and the action on your brake you said was stiff, let’s prepare Liz’s room for painting, oh no we’re out of spackling, Atlas Hardware closed three hours ago, let’s the three of us go out for ice cream—or do you have homework?
My wife materialized at another door. Have you left anything out? she asked, amused at last.
I did my homework at school, said Liz, her long, glossy hair turning its layers over as she turned.
I couldn’t begin to capture it all, I answered my wife.
Daddy…, said Liz, staring at the silent screen where a woman was, I knew, reporting news but now came to the end and smiled and then I saw that Liz sitting there on the floor had flung her head back and was looking up at me upside down, a welcome angle.
She is not in the habit of asking for information. That is, beyond what is normally supplied. I am backward. So many friends divorced ahead of me, questions low-flying in my direction, like the evening in Norm’s living room hearing the cars ashore above us on the West Side Highway but not the faintest wash of river water, and Lucille, returning to the room’s bright black-and-yellow-painted beams, said to Liz and me, I believe, “Sometimes I think, Which one of you is the nice one?” and when Norm said, “Both of them,” Lucille said, “Of course, that’s what I meant.”
Once my wife and I went out on our bikes together, wrenches bagged, the folds of our spare tubes powdery-soft, a French pump in place along my frame—and came back separately. For it had not been a good afternoon in the beginning. At least I did not arrive home riding two bikes.
Liz and Val heard the front door hit my fender and when Liz came into the hall and the refrigerator shut with a sucking thud and she asked where was Mommy, I said that she would be along but I didn’t honestly know where she could be. Liz looked at me. I said, Whatever we do, you are you. Do you understand? Then I added, You are our daughter.
When is Mommy coming home? Liz answered. Is she having dinner out?
On her bike? I said.
Sure, said Liz.
I look up to her, everywhere I turn I guess I have seen her. A new breed of girl, her mother has persuaded me. Freed, I hear. Of old conditioning. So if chosen tomorrow for success, she would not be surprised.
I would hope—I would hope (as we preface things at a meeting in San Diego, Albuquerque, San Antonio, Columbus, Montpelier)—that down deep in her nervous system Liz believes she’s bereft of obligations except to herself—I’ve said it better than I know how. Thanks to her: who assumes much and nothing about her future, including that she is, or has been prepared to live it at an address entirely hers. Sees an adult in the evening who was wiped out first thing in the morning, and thinks, does Liz, not at all that she might have caused the depression (she knows well the word) that extends hollow and banal and lasting before that adult who shall be nameless and genuinely without regard to sex, while with calm before this spectacle she lets the adult get on with it. She does not cry except in anger, which gets exhaled and is gone. She falls into home-makerly locutions, such as asking if I will be in for dinner tonight as if she were planning the meal. Her future—what can I say? She has hidden powers. Gives good advice if approached in the right way, not as a simple adult but one to one.
I pass to and from one aerodrome or the other, promoting steel in major cities, my program mapped a month or two months in advance, yet nothing if not flexible. I wake up, having been awake deep-seated in the multiplied upholstery of a system that works, and correct my slouch, guarding my lower back as a thing, a being, a moral that could come true. I straighten up and then I squeeze back my shoulders and I arch my spine; time empties in front of me along its main, and its overhead and cupped sides pave my way beyond me with what you think’s an elusive new material, you see through it, so the main is known to be there and you to be in it but you don’t exactly see it, and that goes for the bends up ahead, the turns built into it tunneled into the mountainous field through which time never knows itself.
Or am I a new breed of man, hearing my lies yet clear that they are not—and believing them so very honest I then doubt.
Chuck the philosopher’s wife has her dream. She does well to share it. I have mine. Or, rather, Liz’s. Cupped in the middle of the night in my one unpillowed ear. Not like the answer I got at dinner when, just the two of us, I’d asked if she felt Val’s parents were different from her own, more strict, more together, that kind of thing; and she said, No, she didn’t think so, not much; and I said did they have fights? She guessed so, sometimes. And did Val, I asked boringly, mind her mother working? Sometimes, not really. And what was it like having two high-pitched parents?
You? she said. Which parents was I talking about? she asked, smiling with one side of her mouth—what’s for dessert?
Yogurt o
n a stick, I said—raspberry. The phone rang, Liz talked to Val. We had dessert, Liz and I. I asked her, What is this topology you study in math? I had become curious.
I was more than a father supporting a daughter’s research, taking an interest in her homework, suddenly last month’s, last week’s. She answered that it was a math where you didn’t really get right or wrong answers, she remembered that much. She goes to a private school. I sensed that she might have more to say later. She said that she had a stomachache and excused herself. She does well in math, and so when I ascertained that she had received A-minus in topology yet in all honesty (her own) could not say what topology was, I decided topology was something you practiced more than thought about. I checked the dictionary and had something to think about then. What holds constant through the April showers and cloudy nights, through changes, through turnings, twistings, and stretchings. Rubber-sheet geometry, her math book says.
I kissed Liz goodnight, waiting. I went to bed early, so I must have been tired.
Somewhere in my sleep a phone began and began and began to ring. I strove to answer it and woke up on my feet hearing, “Liz! Liz! Liz!” and knew the words meant How could you! and heard them outside me like a set of real objects self-possessed; then, with the next words, I knew the speaker deep in the dark apartment was my daughter now crying, “I didn’t! I didn’t! I didn’t!”
The phone was still ringing in my head. My back was cold.
“It’s OK, Liz,” I said firmly and half asleep. “It’s OK. I’m here.” This, I was glad to feel, was true.
But then, as if I had been running around doing things in the apartment, I knew what I’d stepped on back in the bedroom; for I heard another voice back there behind me say, “What?” and I turned around hearing again but quieter and muddled and now behind me the prior voice of Liz: “I didn’t.”
I went back to bed, remembering a warm place near my wife’s hip. I left her shoe where she had left it when she had come home. She was asleep, whatever she said.
Morality is a composed state of mind, said Chuck, the black philosopher, which seemed reassuring that health-club party-day of the forty-third-floor sunset. But now it seemed wrong, its wrongness reassuring.
Our organist friend put us on the Unitarian Universalist mailing list and the church’s weekly newsletter came and I found in it under the headline “Ultimate Questions,” this supposedly West African saying:
When you think how things are,
And you don’t know how they began,
And how they will go on,
And you don’t know whether they will end…
But rather than quote the rest, I’ll paraphrase it according to my own eclectic faith: “Complete it yourself.”
PARTICLE OF DIFFERENCE
One night it was late, father and son looking out into the street at the weather. Twelve years old, almost thirteen, the boy will sleep soundly but he has a theory or two of what is to be seen out their city window. “The rain has insomnia,” he said. The boy’s mother somewhere out there on her own knows not her limits, but father and son are finding theirs. Give her credit for work, thick skin, looks, getting out of the home and not coming back. There’s the door. The lock hasn’t been changed.
The man would hear the news from a distance, if it was news, like someone out on the landing, rain in the air, things going slow or is it fast?—music overheard. What the boy’s mother’s up to. A bird on the wing. Give her a hand, original-looking woman, pretty fair photographer, no telling how far she’ll go. The boy is beyond whose fault it is, isn’t he? He seems to know something. They named him Lang, and not such a long time ago.
What’s the worst thing that can happen? said an old acquaintance with a sense of humor, checking his watch at lunch one day. More power, dude, you got a day job to pay some bills, and as for her let’s say she’s a screaming success, which she probably isn’t, what’s the worst that can happen?
The man knew his limits and more than that, maybe didn’t. Hunched at the piano, on hold and counting, supper in the oven, on the burner, in the fridge, he wouldn’t bet against his gone wife. What about the kid he gets off to school in the morning who probably knew even these odds and did his own math?
The mother phoned after supper sometimes during homework. Lately something guessed-at from this end of phone calls which he believes she has conveyed but the boy doesn’t say—a new departure you have to feel and it’s not just work. Lang needs no help with homework but puts companionship to use. The living room table itself picks up the clamor of Lang’s mind. They think together, father and son, don’t they?
Jotted on blue graph paper the steps of a problem, a step skipped before you knew it.
“Wait a sec, she wants—”
“Dad—”
“—how you did it,” parent holds steady, who didn’t always get the advanced algebra himself, then did. Slowed down, Lang explained the new and improved denominator. Yet jumps into biology. (How does my child think?) Hydras with their tentacled mouths, cells so simple you could graft one hydra onto another—believe it. (Seems unfair to the hydras.)
The boy saw something in his father, he talked to him. Something’s happening in math. Physics sneaking in! (But math (?): in homework, the father cleaves to what has been asked.) Math is Mrs. Mukta (you can talk to her, smells good, her accent, her get-up, Indian, a transcendent lady, a star the father can tell, the kid’s doing her). Absent occasionally lately, something going on with Immigration, while in class the substitute’s sneaking some physics in. Mad smart, Dad, what T.P. knows. This substitute they know by his initials. Math’s not advanced enough for him, physics is cool, it’s, Sorry, can’t wait till eleventh grade—hey you all, it’s quantum time. The father gets it. Two different ways of same event happening simultaneously, everyone loved it. Can they be ready for it?
“String theory (?),” the boy gives Dad the benefit of the doubt. (Well who didn’t know about string theory, the man thought, nodding, but who did? The very small, you understood; too small.) “My great-aunt Ruth tied a string around her finger so she’d remember.”
“What?”
“Everything.”
“He subbed in Global, too.”
“Will he be at Parent-Teacher?”
“Why would he be at Parent-Teacher?”
The man puts up his fists—the kid throws a punch, a feint. They spar, they mean to buy some gloves.
The man lands a left hand, open, the boy a wild flurry laughing. “Shadow-boxing,” the father teases. The boy fists his father’s arm to the bone, “Did you drop chili powder in the macaroni?”
“Does he teach you chem?”
“He’s amazing. He says to e-mail him.” “Do you?” “Puts his equations up there so fast it all fits.”
Homework lingers after Lang’s down. So much left to do of your own at ten o’clock of a school night. Time off to think.
It gets late and when you sit down at the piano it’s a soft touch on the rather stiff action not to trouble the neighbors. What cost of neighboring, what gauge of nearness? It’s through their cooking smells they think of you if at all (the thought comes at the piano). Piano at midnight along paths cut by the beat you track. Onto something, he should jot chords on a jittery sheet of music paper in front of him.
The worst that can happen. It hits home where new work travels under his fingers at white keys his wife once tried Windex on. Your hands so close they’re exchanging fingers, tipping chords together for small changes an out-of-work jazz player will try, voicing what he sees he was getting at. Even yesterday can change. Who in this household calls this stuff daydreams now?
Yet on a Sunday, food on the table, a good half of who-knows-what is bringing up this boy who knows his dad has a job but is an unemployed musician who works at it every day—as an evening meal menus his son’s likes within a short-order range of ravs, chicken, green beans, the bud-like head of the Brussels sprout and beets in curious fact, the yam—in their colors, covert
seasonings for the man, the music he and Lang listen to at the table.
A message discovered on his cell (Hey Vic, you still there?…) calls up in the very months and months since he’d heard from any club or tried Lou’s Corner. A business message the boy would know to be huge watching his dad try three times while they’re eating to get back to them out of politeness. Matte-black-painted sheetrock walls, three-foot-high painted photos of musicians. “How come they called you?” “What do you mean how come they called me?” But he would like to know himself almost. He hears scattered applause for a solo.
It’s the next night. He’s heard Lang’s Spanish. They’re on the bed sort of acknowledging the ceiling where a luminous galaxy might never be peeled off, long superseded by comix stored under the pillow. Lang down under the covers. “It’s all math, the planets,” the man said. His own tenth-grade math teacher, you know, went way back to music. Two strings, equal tension different lengths, but for the two notes to be in harmony—something (?). A question not nailed, more in it than the man knows. A thinking sound from the boy: “Mmm…ehh…” almost thirteen.
“What was that?” the father remembers these very sounds, and the lanky boy can feel his father’s amusement, his memory.
“If the lengths are proportional,” Lang stresses, his power beyond mere memory.
“Science.”
Eyes shut, what sees the boy? “You’re music, I’m science, Mom’s Mom, but Mom…” “Hey, Lang, the club date’s on.”
“Hey.” The news settles. “That’s great.” “Guess I got friends in—” “You do?” “—low places.” “Who?” “I didn’t ask.” “You sure you didn’t?”