Academy Street (14 page)

He said nothing. His face was sullen, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

She got up and went to her bedroom and returned with the newspaper clipping, and
left it by his plate.

‘That’s all I know, all I have,’ she said. ‘You have his name now. I do not know
his date of birth or his address or anything else.’

She let him read.

‘One day you will want to find him,’ she said distantly.

He asked no questions then or in the days following, or after.

She told Willa.

‘You did the right thing,’ Willa said softly. ‘It’s hard, but the kid will survive.
There are worse things than having no papa.’

A long contemptuous silence ensued, times when he simmered, seethed, bristled at
just the sight of her in the kitchen. It would have been easier if he’d kicked down
doors. She left money and notes on the table, delayed her return from work in the
evenings. At weekends he stayed out late, drinking. Her heart was breaking.

One Saturday morning before his graduation a girl emerged from his room into the
hall. She looked up, her hair tossed, a jacket in her hand, and saw Tess. Startled,
she took a step towards the kitchen door.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know…I’m very sorry.’

She was young, no more than sixteen, blonde. Her voice was soft, kind, ashamed. Tess
looked at her and a fear, an irrational mindless fear that had lain dormant in the
far reaches of her mind, unearthed itself: that out there, somewhere in the city,
Theo had sisters, brothers. They might live nearby. They might go to the same school,
to the same bars and ball games. She could not speak or even nod to the girl. Rising
from her mind was the image of her son naked, in the sexual act, rearing up on his
sister.

In the following weeks a shift occurred, and a slight truce took hold. Small offerings
were made. She found, on the table one evening, a school assignment,
The Golden Mean
,
scored with an A+. She leafed through the paper, pages with tables and columns of
numbers, text too—the longest entitled ‘The Fibonacci Sequence’. She read the overview,
random paragraphs, the conclusion. She felt a surge of pride, and joy at his return,
at the possibilities of his youth and all that lay before him.

There had been a time, briefly, in adolescence when she had feared for him. He had
frightened her with his subterranean silence, and a stare so deep she had felt imperilled.
She would picture him at school slouched at his desk, distracted, perplexed, his
eye scanning the text and then the air, as if searching for the equation for human
feeling. And then interludes when his talk grew profuse, fragmented, euphoric, and
he could not sleep. Everything—his whole being—disturbed by a storming of the spirit.

She felt his struggle, as if a part of him—some deep
Theo
part—yet needed begetting.
Or was being begot. She waited for that part to be switched on, for the faint little
bleeps to sound, and for him to come to. More than once her fear spiked into panic
that what she was witnessing were the beginnings of mania, or a schizophrenic breakdown.
She prayed. She made deals with God. She worried that he had been bequeathed something
terrible by his father, which had lain latent within him until now. She wrestled
with herself, feared that her flawed mothering had caused a rupture and unseated
some deep psychological disturbance.

And then, in his late teens, the storm began to abate. Clipped by a demon, she thought.
A darkness fell on him for weeks, as if he were grieving for an ancient fabulous
self, mourning its loss at a deep cellular level, feeling the taming, the tempering,
the toll it was taking to beget his mortal self and allow the entity that was Theo
to emerge and live and move and have its being in the world.

I3

IT HAPPENED FIRST one Sunday morning at Mass, and again, the next day, in line at
the hospital cafeteria—the urge to touch a man. Any man, any man’s hand, any man’s
arm. Or lean against a man, leave her head on his shoulder. In crowded places, in
shops and buses, she had to fight the impulse to reach out. A face was not essential.
The view from behind, the broad shoulders, the back of a head, a neck. A hirsute
hand on a wallet, on a tray moving alongside her in the hospital canteen, could bring
on the urge. Her fingers twitched and she longed to touch skin, lay her hands on
a head, be privy to a man. One night at a retirement party for a colleague she stood
in the corner of the room watching people, couples, their body language, their secret
signs. Her friend Priscilla was at one end of the room, her husband at the other.
Tess saw him turn, find his wife. She saw the look they exchanged. Later at the bar
he
kissed the top of her head. She had an image of them driving home later, whispering,
giggling, as they undressed in the dark, their son sleeping in the next room. She
looked around at all the wives. Did they realise their good fortune? How, at any
moment, day or night, they could lie against their men, lay claim to them, lay their
heads on chests, their hands on heads.

On the crowded subway a few days later a man seated next to her accidentally touched
her foot. He was wearing a light suit, navy blue, expensive. His beautiful hands
rested on his legs. His left leg was partly touching hers. She felt the rise and
fall of his breath. Under the fabric his thigh muscles flexed. Weak, she left her
hands on her lap. The need to touch him was immense. The train curved, eased into
a bend and her body leaned lightly against his. She closed her eyes, imagined him
raising an arm, taking her into his wingspan. He shifted to free himself. Then the
train was speeding into a station and he was on his feet, moving along the aisle.
She rose and pushed through and stood behind him. He was poised to exit. Outside,
on the platform, a million eyes, and the door opened with a hiss and, in the crush
and split second that his body leaned forward, she put a hand on his arm and pressed
her face into his back, and simultaneously closing her eyes and inhaling she moved
with him, in communion with him and with the body of passengers alighting from the
train.
Pardon me
. Her voice was clipped, confident, her tone sincere, as if she had
merely bumped him accidentally, absent-mindedly, so preoccupied with life was she,
and then carried on, stepping to the left when he went right, going, against her
will, on her way.

On the platform, she stood, dazed. Out in the streets people pushed by her. She moved
along the sidewalk, heat coming off the pavement. She looked up at the street numbers—she
was in the 80s, far from home. She looked in gleaming shop windows, cafés, restaurants
with diners outside under awnings. The sun beat down. She crossed onto quieter streets.
Fine hotels, apartment buildings with doormen. She looked up at the windows. She
saw, in her mind’s eye, lovers in shaded rooms, naked, spent. Emerging out onto the
street later, holding hands, all loved up. All loved up. Those were the words Willa
had used one time telling a story when she and Darius had returned from a vacation.
There we were
, she’d said,
heading out for dinner, all loved up.

She turned right, crossed Third Avenue, then Second, First, York, drawn by the promise
of water. She entered a park and followed the path. Families with children, young
couples, old men with dogs and sorrowful eyes seeking the shade of trees. Then she
was standing on the edge of the East River. Seagulls’ wings glinted in the sun. On
the other side, in a blue haze, Queens. It was there he had lived. A boat passed
and left behind a trail of white foam. She watched it spread and diffuse, until there
was almost no trace left. Watching the swell and motion of the waves and the surf,
she felt seasick. She tried not to break. She looked around. Under the still surface
of the day she saw turmoil everywhere. She thought of the water that had lain quietly
calm, each tiny drop, each molecule, restful, suddenly wrenched, catapulted through
a metal rotary, tossed back out into the turbulent current, reeling, confounded,
changed.

∼

She confessed her compulsion to Willa. They were sitting under trees in Inwood Hill
Park, behind them a hill of old stone, like a quarry. They had brought a small picnic,
and wine.

‘I think there’s something wrong with me. I’ve started looking at men, strange men,’
she said shyly.

Willa eyed her, beamed a smile. ‘Go on!’

She winced. ‘On the subway, in church, you know, just watching them…I can’t help
myself. It’s turning into an obsession. Next I’ll be stalking them!’

‘Oh Tess, you’re just a real ripe healthy woman, that’s all!’ She gave a little smile.
‘We’ll have to find you a suitor, Miss Lohan. We’ll have to find you some gorgeous
gentleman caller!’

She expected Theo to enter a field of science, or the humanities. She thought this
was where his sensibilities lay. But he chose business at Fordham College. For a
time he continued to live with her, before moving into a house in Harlem with a girlfriend
and two friends. He took all his belongings, his records. She did not think he would
ever come back. Little by little, since childhood, he had grown further from her.
She wondered if he had ever searched for his father. He called her each Friday; their
conversations centred on his studies and finances. Now and then he dropped by. In
person he gave off an air of irritation. She felt estranged from him. She felt his
resistance to being fully known by her, as if time spent together in naked silence
would reveal something he could not bear. And yet, at times, she saw understanding
in his eyes.
When he rose to leave a softening occurred, a hesitation in his limbs.
She knew then that he had gleaned the parting sickness in her. She felt the terrible
tug and conflict within him and wanted to free him. In that moment she braced herself,
summoned all her strength, affected an air of busyness, of a life fully engaged,
and sent him on his way. Her rooms could barely endure the silence left in his wake.

No gentleman caller wooed her. Some tried, but no love materialised. She went on
several hopeful dates with Priscilla’s brother-in-law, a high school teacher, a great
bear of a man whose ebullience and over-eagerness to please ate up all her energy.
She began to see an older man, a doctor at the hospital—a divorcé. He took her to
an elegant restaurant and with a little wine inside her she felt beautiful, and in
the candlelight he was not unhandsome. His manners were impeccable. He had just
returned from Rome. But in his hands, in his darting eyes and self-conscious awareness
of himself in the world, she sensed an otherness, felt him a stranger. She knew already
he was not a fit. In her life, ever, there were only a few people who had been a
fit, with whom she had felt understood. Her mother, Claire, David, Willa. In his
childhood, Theo. The longing to be with them persisted, a longing so deep and eternal
it must have had ancient origins.

Out in the street her doctor hailed a cab. ‘May I kiss you?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘I haven’t been kissed in quite a while.’

‘All the more reason to kiss you then.’ He drew her to
the shadows. He was a man
used to getting his own way. He took her face in his hands and kissed her and paused,
until she kissed him back. The kisses grew longer and with the wine and his hands
moving on her back she felt herself yielding, arching into him, her body egging
her on. When they drew apart he was smiling. He seemed bemused, triumphant, arrogant.
He became, again, strange to her. His face did not move her. There was little in
him she wanted to know.

‘Till next time, then,’ he said.

Inside the cab she could smell his cologne. She closed her eyes and laid her head
back. She longed for a passionate, even outrageous, life. She pictured him naked,
rutting. His hands on her, all over her, in her. Strange hands, strange eyes. And
his mind, his thoughts, alien too, and so apart from hers. She opened her eyes. She
could not give herself to this stranger. She would need to be
known
. She would need
to know him too, decipher him, make unstrange his mind. She would need to be a little
in love. And this man—a divorcé and a man of the world—would not wait. This was the
way with men.

In the days following she tried to want him—she wanted to want him. But in her private
fantasies she could not call him forth. It was David who came, always David, his
face known to her, his voice tender and lonely, his mind adhered to hers. They had
come together once, like planets colliding. Her body had never forgotten him, not
for an instant, as if by being her first, by taking and entering and impregnating
her, he had annexed her, and some twist or quirk of nature had ensured that he remain.
Her Adam, her primary man, the
first and foremost, the father, the one who had made
his mark and against whom all others would be measured.

Frustrated, impatient, she vowed to sublimate desire. She turned to learning. She
had always considered herself an unlettered woman but resolved to cultivate a life
of the mind. Theo’s legacy, the fire of his passion and early curiosity, was igniting
in her now. She enrolled in an evening class on Greek Mythology at the library a
few blocks away on Broadway. From the start she was intoxicated. Alone, she wept
for Demeter’s grief, for Prometheus’s torment as he lay bound to the rock. The gods
and goddesses entered her and resonated and she was porous to every myth and odyssey,
as if the ghosts of Olympus had always lain dormant in her, waiting to be resurrected.
She encountered them everywhere, found them threaded through her days, in ads and
logos, in films, on the signage of trucks, in the names of towns—Troy, Ithaca, Delphi
Falls. Ancient Greece was all over America. On street corners she saw people descend
into the subway, and felt a little shiver at their blind oblivion, had an urge to
forewarn them, hand them coins, beseech them not to look back.