After the Moment (6 page)

"I'll have to study a lot, though," Leigh said. "Exams start during the first week in June."

"Yes, okay," Clayton said. "This is your mother's boyfriend, right?"

"They've been dating almost three years," Leigh said, fairly sure that Pete, exactly Clayton's age, was too old to be described as any kind of boy. "You know that. You met him last year when you were in the city."

"Yes, so I did. Tall fellow, right?"

"About your height, Dad."

Leigh wondered what it was like to go through life without noticing much about the people around you. He hoped it wasn't as frustrating for his father as it was for those who were forced to love him.

~~~

Pete lived in Maine most of the year, but he kept a small apartment in the city. He had once run a real estate company that didn't buy property but invested in it. He had explained it to Leigh in a way that made perfect sense in the telling but none once he had time to think about it. The point of the story that stuck with Leigh was that Pete had worked all the time. Nights, weekends, and summer vacations, he was working.

Sort of the way Clayton worked, but with a fierceness. As if Pete had gone to war when he worked instead of taking refuge in it, as Leigh thought his father did.

Pete said he came home one day and his wife was gone. This, Pete told him, was not that unusual a story. Lots of women, he said, walked out on bad marriages by packing their bags. What made his story horrible, Pete said, was that it took him ten days to notice she had left. But when he did realize it, he sold his share in the company, let his wife have their apartment as part of the divorce settlement, and moved to Maine.

He was still a consultant for his old company, and he did do work on a freelance basis for people who owned similar companies. But he never took more than one business trip a month, and he never canceled a scheduled visit to see Lillian or Kathleen.

Pete was rich—Leigh understood this without having to be told—but he never seemed rich. Leigh wasn't sure exactly what he meant by that, but he knew kids at school whose parents were rich, and Pete wasn't like them. In Leigh's mind, people with money were like the born-again Christians you saw on TV—convinced of how right they were, because hadn't their actions brought them wealth? Money was like the secular equivalent to salvation. Pete, however, was full of doubt, and Leigh liked how he sometimes hesitated before speaking, even if all he wound up saying was "Do you want breakfast?"

The house in Maine was full of windows, blonde wood, and open spaces. It faced a tidal river, so that the view was always changing as the water moved in and out. Pete, after the divorce, had bought two wooded lots and hired a crew to clear them. There were enough trees left behind to give the impression that the house had simply grown up amongst them.

He worked with an architect and a contractor but built all the porches himself. He'd tried doing the kitchen on his own, but after a year of boiling water on a hot plate and stepping over sawdust and poorly connected pipes, he turned it over to professionals.

"I know when I'm beat," he said.

Lillian, curled up on a huge armchair, said, without taking her eyes off the river, "Anyone who wound up with that kitchen can hardly be described as beat."

Over the weekend, Leigh ran, ate a huge amount of fish, and studied. He liked the way Pete and his mother left him alone without making him feel ignored. He had never spent an extended period of time with his mother around a man whom she was dating. Pete didn't sleep at the apartment when Leigh was there, and Lillian never went out for the night the way he knew other mothers did.

In as much as anyone can think about their parents and sex, Leigh knew Lillian was having it, but Pete seemed to really like his mother for reasons above and beyond that. Pete listened to what she said, asked about her work, and talked with her for an hour at dinner about the history of plumbing (Lillian knew a lot about plumbing, because in historical romance novels, taking a bath was often a huge plot point). Leigh decided that Pete had asked his mother out because he liked her and that sex was mixed up in it, but not in an obvious, all-there-is way.

Leigh knew he liked Astra, but he also knew that sleeping with her was the thing he liked best. He didn't think this was wrong, exactly, but neither was it right. It wasn't that she didn't like it—Leigh had seen parts of her body shiver and felt others swell and heat. But he knew that sex was not what Astra liked best about him. It would almost be worth skipping all the years between now and Pete's age of fifty-two in order to finally be a man who could see a girl without seeing only an opportunity.

It was odd to be around a man and want to be like that man. It made him feel sad and disloyal that he never had wanted to be like Clayton. Leigh hoped that by accepting Millie's request to live in Calvert Park, he would find a way to want to be like his father.

But for now he could aspire to be like Pete, who, watching him ice his foot one night, said, "You know, I used to run marathons, and you shouldn't have to be doing that. How much does it hurt?"

Up until that moment, Leigh's thoughts about the pain had been mostly of the
Not again
variety. Now, forced to quantify it, he said, "A lot, actually. Kind of a lot."

"Can I see?" Pete asked, before lifting the ice pack and moving Leigh's foot back and forth and side to side. "You should get an X-ray. Might be a stress fracture."

"Great," Leigh said. "How long will I have to stop running, do you think?"

"I don't know. A month, at least. Maybe two."

"I don't even like running," Leigh said. "It's for soccer."

"Well, now you'll have to stop," Pete said, with a slight smile. "And probably find out that you liked it more than you thought."

No doubt, there was a lesson somewhere in that comment, but for now Leigh was content to imagine his foot restored to him, pain-free and whole.

A set of X-rays confirmed it. Leigh had a stress fracture in the third metatarsal bone and needed to ease off running for six to eight weeks.

"You probably trained too hard, too fast," the orthopedist said when Leigh explained that he'd been running because his soccer coach felt that he needed to work on his endurance. "No reason for you to quit working on your performance, though. Try the pool."

Which was how he came to spend the month or so he had left in the city swimming every morning at an overpriced health club where Pete had given him a temporary membership as a present.

Leigh's previous plan for the summer had been to return as a junior aide to the city's summer program for special needs kids. He'd done it the previous summer and had been so horrible as a reading tutor that the director moved him to the boys' athletic program. Kids, ages six to nine, who had ADD, ADHD, or mild autism (called Asperger's, which sounded, to Leigh, like a pain reliever) loved to run but had no idea how to actually follow the rules of a game. Leigh had been assigned to act as a field shadow, helping to keep the boys focused on playing.

He had been really good at it, but he knew that running after a bunch of hyperactive kids all day would be impossible with a stress fracture. He had to do something, not only because he would lose his mind sitting around but because colleges liked to see summers spent in worthwhile pursuits. He had been an intern two summers before at a gallery on Twenty-second Street, owned by a friend of Lillian's. It had been fun and, in its way, interesting, although Leigh had mostly filed invoices, letters, and drafts of brochure copy.

On such short notice it was almost impossible to get a new internship, and so Leigh found himself working for his mother's editor in the romance division of the publishing house. Every other intern was a girl. He mostly liked being around them as they talked, complained, ordered coffee, and did their jobs. It was just Xeroxing, filing, and writing up readers' reports on the huge number of manuscripts that came in
every day.
Leigh couldn't believe how many people wanted to write romance novels. He also couldn't believe how the girls could take these things so seriously.

The interns (and the editors!) talked endlessly about whether it worked when the hero initially didn't like the heroine, not realizing that he really loved her. They analyzed the merits of the strong, feisty, "modern" heroine versus the ones who were more old fashioned. And, as a group and among themselves, they all argued about whether or not the heroes were the right kind of men.

Leigh wanted to tell them that a hero in a romance novel was
no kind
of man—no one could be that absurdly perfect. But the girls he worked with seemed to know this already and argued about it as a way of discussing boys in general in much the same way he and his friends talked about movie stars as a way of judging girls in general. Because he had spent years listening to his mother talk about her work he found things to say in readers' reports that did not dwell on how fascinated he was by the ideals the characters had to conform to or on how much the stories in the manuscripts bored him.

~~~

The war did not have summer vacation, but Leigh found he had become used to it. He still tried to keep track of who had died, but what was happening there had become difficult to follow, with no one willing to say anything clearly. The reasons for the war shifted slightly, with the emphasis now more on freedom and less on illegal weapons. Leigh no longer asked his mother anything about Iraq. The whole thing made her livid, and he didn't believe—wouldn't or couldn't, he wasn't sure which—that it was
all
bad any more than it was
all
good.

~~~

On the night before Astra left for her college tour, Leigh took her out to dinner at a place that served omelets. She loved them and always told him he should think seriously about eating more eggs.

"They're a perfect protein," she said happily, spearing into a three cheese and chive dish.

"I'll miss you," he said, meaning it.

"I was thinking that you should come and see me," she said.

"Yes, definitely, sure," he said. "I mean, I'm sure to visit my mom, so of course I'll see you."

"No, listen," Astra told him. "My parents are going to be in California for Thanksgiving. Mom has cousins there."

"Nice," he said, because, after all, California was nice.

"I'll be alone, filling out applications," Astra said. "Mom wants me done by the time they get back."

Leigh, who could type even faster than his mother, had typed more than a few of Astra's papers. Did Astra want him to come up in November and type her applications?

"Leigh, we could be together," she said, leaning across the table. "For the whole time. You know, no sneaking around, no being in a hurry."

Of all the humiliating things sex in high school involved, finding the time and privacy was right up there with having no experience in what you so desperately wanted to master. So far, sex with Astra had been what they hid and hurried and worried over. For them, sex had never been what unfolded at its own pace.

"I'll be here in November," he said, not sure he deserved the good fortune of being Astra Grein's boyfriend.

But she had picked him, so who was he to point out the error of her ways? When they kissed goodbye outside her building, he felt it more like a greeting.

~~~

Lillian and Pete drove Leigh down to Calvert Park. Leigh had been surprised at how many things he owned and how strongly he felt the need to bring almost all of them along. It was a Tuesday, so of course Clayton was not home, which spared Leigh from having to introduce him, once again, to Pete.

Millie hugged Lillian, who had a package of romance novels for her, and shook hands with Pete. Janet gave everyone iced tea, and walked with Lillian around the backyard, to where Bubbles had been banished until she could calm down at the sight of Leigh's many boxes going into the house. When the last box was set down and Millie had run downstairs to answer the door, Pete looked around and said, "This'll be good. You'll have more space here than at home."

Not only had shelves been built, but also a long, wide desk on which Janet had put a tape dispenser, a stapler, a new box of pens, and a dictionary.

"I guess I won't be doing my homework in the kitchen," Leigh said, pulling a pen from the box.

It was black, with an extra-fine tip. His favorite.

"You and Lillian are a little cramped there," Pete said.

Aware that Clayton's house was much bigger than his mother's apartment, Leigh shrugged, not wanting Pete to think of Lillian as less well off.

"I'd like to ask your mother to move in with me," Pete said. "I don't know if she'll say yes."

Leigh stayed as still as possible, his eyes fixed on the pen in his hand, hoping Pete wasn't asking for his opinion on what Lillian might say. Or want.

"She'll talk to you before she decides," Pete said, "but I hope you already know that no matter what happens, you'll have a home where I live."

This seemed, on the face of it, an absurd thing to say. And yet, as if in the distance, Leigh could hear a real kindness, as well as a generosity that struck him as rare and important.

"Thank you," he said, feeling ridiculous and uneasy. "That's very kind."

He was saved from the need to say anything more by Millie's bursting in with a boy Leigh did not know.

The boy was not quite Millie's height, and wore glasses. He had on a pair of shorts and a button-down shirt several sizes too big for him. The shorts, in fact, looked too big as well, giving the impression that he had shrunk after dressing himself.

"This is Franklin," Millie said. "He lives down the street."

"Franklin Staines," the boy said, shaking hands with Pete and Leigh. "How do you do?"

"Maia's here," Millie said. "She made a cake and Franklin's brother drove her over."

"With me," Franklin said, stating the obvious.

"Maia thought the frosting might melt if she walked it over, as it's so hot," Millie said.

It was hot; even with the low, steady hum of central air, you could feel the wet heat pressing in from the outside. And it explained why it had seemed to take so long to carry boxes up the stairs.