Part 19 (1/2)

I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I had nothing to tell him. All I could think of were the deathbed cliches, which any stranger might have offered. Still, I offered them. The alternative was to let him die in silence.

”It's all right,” I said. ”Everything's all right.”

He could not speak. His face was darkened and enlarged by the effort of his breathing.

I said, ”Don't worry about Mom or me. We'll be fine. Everything's all right, really. Everything's fine.”

I couldn't tell if he heard me. He seemed to have gone so far inside himself, to have withdrawn from his own brain and focused his very being on the insufficient action of his lungs. I kept stroking his head and shoulders. I kept telling him everything would be all right.

And, after a while, he recovered. The air started catching in his lungs again and his face, minute by minute, lost its wild, strangled quality. We sat together in the dirt while his lungs, worn thin as cheesecloth, somehow managed once again to negotiate the pa.s.sage of oxygen.

Finally he was able to say, ”Guess I overextended. I got a little carried away there.”

”You'd better stay here,” I said. ”I'll go get help.”

He shook his head. ”I'll be all right,” he said. ”We just have to walk back very slowly. Okay?”

”Sure. Of course. Dad, I'm sorry.”

”What for?”

I helped him to his feet and we began the long walk home. It would take us over an hour to cover a distance we'd managed in twenty minutes on the way out. Stars fell overhead.

When I was fifteen, my father and I drove to Chicago together on a shopping trip and got caught in a storm on our way back. Rain fell in sheets; the sky deepened to the opaque green-gray that breeds tornadoes. It got so bad we pulled off at a rest area overlooking a muddy lake backed by the vast green of a barley field. Rain hammered on the roof and hood of our car. We sat in silence, occasionally clearing our throats, until a flick of lightning turned the lake's surface a brief livid yellow. Then we both started to laugh. The lightning might have been the punch line of a long, complicated joke. When we were through laughing we talked about my future, about the possibility of getting a new dog, and about our ten favorite movies. After the storm pa.s.sed we drove home with the radio playing and the windows open. Later we would learn that a tornado had in fact touched down in the vicinity and had flattened a water tower and an Amish cemetery not twenty miles from where we'd been parked.

Now we walked together, very slowly, through the blue-white desert night. ”Dad?” I said.

”Yes, son.”

”Maybe we can go to another movie tomorrow. I hear Moonstruck Moonstruck isn't too bad.” isn't too bad.”

”Fine. You know me, I'm always good for a movie.”

Unfamiliar insects produced a soft but insistent chirp; a crisp whir like the sound the earth itself might make rolling through the darkness if we all kept quiet enough to hear it. The lights of the condominium complex shone. They were not far away. Still, they looked almost too real and close to touch. They were like holes punched in the night, leaking light from another, more animated world. For a moment I could imagine what it would be like to be a ghost-to walk forever through a silence deeper than silence, to apprehend but never quite reach the lights of home.

CLARE.

A LL HE'D LL HE'D say was ”Basic visit to the parents. Guilt and movies. They live in a pueblo now.” But Jonathan was quieter after that, more p.r.o.ne to secrecy and half sentences. He kept the door to his room closed. In March, he announced that he was moving out. say was ”Basic visit to the parents. Guilt and movies. They live in a pueblo now.” But Jonathan was quieter after that, more p.r.o.ne to secrecy and half sentences. He kept the door to his room closed. In March, he announced that he was moving out.

I asked him why.

”To get a life,” he said.

When I asked what exactly he thought he was living at that moment, he said, ”A canceled ticket.”

It was morning. One of the pale slushy March mornings that arrive one after another, as if they were raveling off a spool. Jonathan stared out the living-room window. He flicked his hair with his fingertips in a sullen cafe style when he said the word ”ticket.”

”Honey,” I said, ”just tell me what you mean in ordinary English.”

He sighed, reluctant to face me on plain terms. Displays of joy, affection, or generosity came easily to him. He could speak decorously in his own voice. But when he was angry or sad, he needed an image to work from. I had seen him get mad in the caustic, eye-popping style of Bette Davis. I'd seen him suffer embarra.s.sment like a street kid, with downcast eyes and hands balled into fists. This hair-flicking, window-gazing thing was new.

”Come on,” I said. ”Speak.”

He turned to face me. ”The life I'd been preparing myself for has been called off,” he said. ”I thought I could stay unattached and love a lot of different people. You and Bobby included.”

”You can. You do.”

”I can't. It's a new age, everybody's getting married.”

”Not me, thank you,” I said.

”Yes you are. You're with Bobby now. I've got to find somebody of my own, and I don't feel like I have all the time in the world anymore. I mean, Clare, what if I'm sick?”

I paused. ”You're not sick,” I said.

”You don't know that. We may not know for years.”

”Jonathan, sweetheart, you're being melodramatic.”

”Am I?”

”Yes. You're fine, I can just tell. You're perfectly healthy. Now don't move out, you'll break up the family.”

”You and Bobby are the family,” he said. ”Just the two of you.” And he turned back to the window, where across the air shaft a young Puerto Rican woman was hanging boys' briefs and men's black socks on a laundry line.

I thought I'd be pregnant soon. I'd stopped taking precautions. But I couldn't seem to tell anyone, not Bobby or Jonathan. I suppose I was ashamed of my own motives. I didn't like the idea of myself as calculating or underhanded. All I wanted, really, was to get pregnant by accident. The unexpected disadvantage of modern life is our victory over our own fates. We're called on to decide so much, almost everything, and we're thoroughly informed about repercussions. In another era I'd have had babies in my twenties, when I was married to Denny. I'd have become a mother without quite deciding to. Without weighing the consequences. But Denny and I had at first been too sensible-we were living on my trust money, and he had big ambitions-and then too furious to let ourselves give birth. I did get pregnant accidentally, by a member of Denny's dance troupe who'd told me he was gay. But I'd had it taken care of. At that age, during that time, you skimmed away the extraneous. You kept yourself lean and unenc.u.mbered, ready to travel.

Now I wanted a baby, and I wanted to raise it with Jonathan. We could be a new kind of family. A big disjointed one, with aunts and uncles all over town. But I couldn't bring myself to confess what I was after. I was trying to stage my own accident. I just needed more time.

In an effort to cheer Jonathan up, I got him to bring Erich home for dinner. He didn't want to. He had to be nagged into it. It took more than a week. I wouldn't give in, though, because I believed in what I was doing. My theory of Jonathan's trouble was simple. He had let his life get divided up into too many different compartments. There was his job, and his life with Bobby and me. There were a few friends from college, and a random s.e.xual life with strangers, and an ongoing affair with a man none of us had ever met. I believed he needed more areas of overlap.

”Why don't you want to bring Erich over for dinner?” I asked on a dim morning that would not quite settle into rain. ”Are you ashamed of us?”

I had on a pink chenille bathrobe, and had tied my hair up in a zebra-print bandanna. For a moment I could see myself as somebody's shrewish wife, hands fisted on her bony hips. It was far from a flattering image. But I didn't mind it entirely. At least a woman like that knew what she wanted. Ambiguity and indecision didn't swarm around her like flies.

”Of course not,” Jonathan said. ”I've told you. He and the Hendersons wouldn't get along.”

He was trying to leave for work. He had one shoe on. He was sipping at a mug of coffee while Bobby b.u.t.tered a bagel for him.

”We won't invite the Hendersons,” I said. ”It can just be the four of us, regular civilians too worried about our own shortcomings to notice anybody else's.”

”He and I don't have that kind of relations.h.i.+p,” Jonathan said.

”What kind?”

”The 'Come on over and meet the roommates' kind. It'd just be uncomfortable. For everyone.”

”How do you know, if you've never done it?” I asked. ”Honey, to be perfectly honest with you, I think you set limits on your relations.h.i.+ps by deciding in advance and entirely on your own what they can and cannot involve.”