Everything Happens Today (25 page)

Wes glanced down at his plate and was surprised to find that he had eaten almost everything, other than a few remnants of potato and greens. He couldn't remember eating any but the first mouthful. Nora, who was normally an adventurous eater, had made a game attempt, but the sweetbread had defeated her and more than three quarters of it remained on her plate. Her potatoes, on the other hand, were all gone. She caught Wes's eye and pointed with one hand to the emptiness where the potato had been, and mimed rubbing her tummy with the other. “Bobby like,” she mouthed wordlessly, and returned her attention to the television.

“Now then, you have to start making some big decisions. Just sort of let your imagination go. Think if you were a tree where you'd like to live. This tree, he lives right here at the side of the brook. He has one of the prettiest views. He looks out over this brook and watches everything happen. This is your tree, so you make it any way that you want, any way that you want. In your world, you can have anything, anything.”

Something had just happened, and now Wes thought he knew what it was. He had always imagined that if he could persuade Delia to look deep into this eyes, she would see herself in them the way he saw her, and that she would understand that she was being seen in a way that no one had ever seen her, and loved in a way that no one had ever loved her. He had been convinced of it, but what he had failed to grasp was how hard it is to persuade someone to look into your eyes with the confidence and patience to see what you wanted them to see. It wasn't the love that was difficult; it was the communication of love. It was the willingness of the other to be loved and to look for the love. And what had just happened to Wes was that he had looked into Lucy's eyes precisely the way he had always hoped Delia would look into his, and there had been a message waiting for him there. Its meaning had been far from obvious, its intention less explicit than what he had had in store for Delia, but it was clearly a message that was addressed to him alone. And it would also be a mirror of some sort, or a portrait, a painting of himself. That much he had been able to tell; he just hadn't been able to recognize himself in it in any way.

What exactly did she see when she looked at him? What if it were Wes instead of Lucy, stumbling upon a family scene like this one? He recalled a book or a movie, without remembering what it was, in which the dying hero floats disembodied over the battlefield where he has been mortally wounded, and looks down with infinite and equal compassion and understanding on the slayers and the slain alike. Wes imagined himself doing the same thing here, in this sickroom. What would he see? A frail, dying woman, half-crazed with suffering and ill-served by the indifference, confusion and horror of her children and absent husband; a perfect, beautiful little girl, born to be generous, kind and loving, but already firmly on the path towards a lifetime of myopic stumbling towards things that, from a distance, look like love but turn out to be anything but; a boy, angry and resentful, self-involved and self-pitying, a fly caught and struggling in a spider's web, a villain and a spy, a perennial shopper in the flea market of second-hand ideas and emotions, dressed in everyone's cast-offs yet with no style of his own, morose with offended vanity but covetous and envious of all and everything. If he were Delia or Lucy, what would he make of such a boy? If he were James, or Nora, or Mrs. Fielding, could he even like such a boy? Could he, like the dying soldier, ever summon up compassion and understanding for such a boy?

“And just remember, we don't make mistakes here. There are no mistakes, only happy little accidents.”

Lucy slid off the bed and settled on the floor beside him, holding her finger to her lips and nodding towards Nora and his mother, entwined in sleep on the bed behind them. She pressed her shoulder against his and wrapped one hand around his bicep, but she kept her eyes firmly glued to the television, where Bob Ross was getting ready to sign his painting and call it a day. Whatever the message she had for him, she was going to hold it in store for a new day.

“This little piece of canvas is your world and on here you can do anything that your heart desires. You can create any illusion that you want here. You can find peace and tranquility here, or you can make big storms. It just depends on what your mood is that day. Painting is just a way of capturing a second of time and mood, and putting it on canvas. And maybe a hundred years from now somebody will look at your painting and know that you had a fantastic day, and that on this day you truly did experience the joy of painting. God bless.”

The credits began to roll and the hokey electronic xylophone theme song to play, but Lucy didn't move. For a moment Wes thought that she, too, had fallen asleep, but then he felt her fingers tapping the beat against his arm. She smelled of the same soap she had smelled of at the party, and her nails were short, like a boy's, but shiny with clear polish. Wes turned to her and was about to try to kiss her when he thought better of it.

“Do you want to stay?” he whispered.

She hesitated a moment then shook her head. “I'm getting picked up at my place at six in the morning. Anyway.”

“Yes we can.”

“No, that's what I'm saying, we can't . . . ”

“No, I mean Obama. Pennsylvania. Yes We Can.”

She snorted and buried her laughter against his shoulder. “Yes. We. Can. But not tonight.”

“Help me with this stuff?”

Together, they gathered up the dirty dishes and piled them on the tray as quietly as possible. His mother had not touched her food, but even Lucy had barely made it through half of hers.

“Not so crispy, eh?”

“They do it better in Paris.”

“Not enough potato flakes.”

He took the heavy tray from Lucy and handed her the empty one, and they went to the kitchen together. The wine bottle had been emptied. Wes was too tired to clean up, but since he knew that he would be the first awake in the morning, he was confident that the dirty dishes would be waiting for him the next day. Even in his exhaustion, he had enough presence of mind to rinse the dishes and fill the pots with water, in order to make his chore easier tomorrow. Nora appeared in the doorway, rubbing her eyes, and Lucy rubbed her back between the shoulder blades.

“I'd better be going, Typo.”

“Don't go, Lucy. You can sleep in my room.”

“Sorry Cookie.”

“Leslie's usually a better cook than that.”

“He'd better be if he wants me to eat at this restaurant again. Someone told me he makes a mean risotto.”

“Who told you that?”

“He did.”

“Chump.”

“I'll see you when?”

“Monday morning, natch.”

He leaned in to kiss her goodbye chastely. She whispered “Well done” in his ear, and was gone.

“Bobby like Lucy.”

“Typo too.”

“Are you going to bed?”

“Nah. I'd better try to make a little headway with my homework. Wanna come read in my room?”

“Sure.”

Together, they plodded up the stairs in silence, Wes stopping off at their mother's room to tuck her under the covers and turn out the lights. At the top of the stairs, Nora branched off to her room. Even before he opened his bedroom door he felt a current of cold air on his bare toes, and upon opening it was met with a swirl of wind and the sound of rustling leaves. Without turning on the light, he walked to the window and leaned out. The night had turned autumnal, and there were even a few bright stars in the sky. The wind in the trees drowned out all other sounds of the city, and Wes enjoyed the feel of cold air on his face for a few moments before turning back into the room and shutting the window behind him. He grabbed his laptop and the copy of
War and
Peace from the desk. It had occurred to him that the scene of the dying soldier could well be out of
War and Peace
, and that if he could find it again it might provide sorely needed inspiration to the task at hand. But even as he leafed through the book he realized that the scene could not possibly be from
War and Peace
, because the soldier, whoever he is, dies on the battlefield, whereas Prince André is wounded at Borodino but does not die until much later. Even so, Wes continued to flick through the book, barely able to remember what the whole fuss was about. A thousand pages of nothing; even ten thousand would have been insufficient to describe one minute of a real person's life, he thought. But the paper had to get written, inspired or not. Wes came upon his scrawled notes at the back of the book, and his eyes fell on the paragraph about Petya.

 

• “Death of Petya. Manipulative to what end except pathos? Ultimately, P's death is necessary to get Natasha to focus on her mother and someone else's grief, but that is just a plot twist. Is a boy's life of so little value? Never identified with Petya, boyscout type, but angry on his behalf.”

 

Maybe Wes could make something out of that? To show, by parsing the trajectory of a minor character like Petya, how Tolstoy manipulates character to further his programmatic novelistic ends—a kind of deconstructionist analysis that strips away the flesh of so-called “realism” to reveal the bare skeleton of ideology beneath? Wes was willing to bet that no one in Mrs. Fielding's class had ever written a paper about Petya before, or even given his character more than a passing consideration. It would be a very clever tour de force. But just as he was beginning to warm to the prospect, Wes felt his enthusiasm collapse like a punctured balloon. It wasn't so much that it was a bad idea, but Wes had had a sudden vision of himself—striving, conniving, intellectually dishonest and arrogant, too interested in making a mark and scoring a point—and it made him dizzy with exhaustion. He was exhausted by
War and Peace
, by the very idea of
War and Peace
, but most of all he was exhausted by himself, by the incredible amount of energy it took to keep this carnival on the road. It would be better just to dig in, like a road-weary donkey, than to maintain this charade. It would be more honest to resubmit the paper on the
Manual
, for all its flaws, and take the F he had coming to him, even if it meant ruining his college prospects, than it would be to try and find something interesting, original and engaging to say about
War and Peace
. Even as he thought these things Wes knew there was little chance that they would come to pass, that it was only the exhaustion speaking and that by tomorrow he would probably have some rescue plan figured out, but right now he was so heartily sick and tired of himself that the prospect of academic Armageddon filled him with a kind of ecstatic, mystic elation, like a medieval saint. He thought of the dream he'd had that morning, and the imagery of counting light bulbs and plummeting aircraft made a certain sense in light of the day's experience. He had been right, after all, to assume that the mind knew its own business and understood things that were difficult to communicate to the consciousness. Even when Wes came to despise his own mind and everything it put him through, it was out there working on his behalf. His thoughts were interrupted by a strange noise coming from the kitchen two floors below, and he paused to consider it just as Nora entered the room in pajamas and slippers, book in hand.

“What's that sound?”

“What sound?”

“Downstairs. Listen.”

Nora halted in the doorway and cocked her head. She was in her old Paul Frank pjs, riddled with monkey-face logos, that she often wore in moments of stress, although now, of course, they were far too small for her and made her look a little like a circus freak. Wes considered her fondly, and smiled.

“It must be dad doing the dishes.”

“Holy shit, I think you're right.”

Nora threw herself down on the bed beside Wes and began to leaf through the pages of her book.

“Whatcha reading?”

“
I Capture the Castle
.”

“What's it about?”

“It's about a girl who lives in a falling-apart castle with her sister and her dad, who used to be a famous writer but isn't anymore, and she's sick of everything but she's super smart, and then she and her sister fall in love with some rich boys who move in next door, or something like that.”

“Is it European?”

“I don't know? Is England European?”

“Is it a kid's book or an adult book? I mean, is it something you might read in a high school English class?”

“I don't know. It's by the same lady who wrote
A Hundred and One Dalmatians
.”

Wes sighed and closed his eyes. Whatever the solution was, it would have to wait until the next day, as he was too tired to think. He listened to Nora turning the pages of her book and breathing heavily through her nose, and he knew that he could fall asleep right then and there, but felt that there was something still to do that he had left undone. He opened his eyes, and his gaze happened to fall on the bookshelf above his desk. He pushed himself up heavily from the bed, crossed the room and reached out for the thin, ragged hard-cover novel sandwiched between two massive, glossy textbooks. It was
The Breadbaking District
. He took it back to the bed and examined it. Although he had never read it, this was not the first time he had held it in his hands, but he felt that in some way he was seeing it for the very first time. The cover was a kind of pastiche of a Dickensian novel, with a nineteenth-century lithograph of a baker sliding a paddle of dough into a brick oven, a daintily filigreed border and an ornate Victorian typeface that Wes thought made the book look cheap, as if the publisher could not afford a real designer. The paper stock, too, was clearly not of the best, and Wes wondered whether his father had been aware at the time of publication how little effort his publisher had put into making his book attractive. Wes turned the book over and read the captions on the back. “An impressive debut . . . captures the elation and sweet sorrow of first love.” “The author shows promise beyond his years . . . someone to be watched.” Even the blurbs—written not by real writers but by anonymous reviewers in professional journals—seemed half-hearted, hardly commendations at all, and Wes felt sad for his father. He was sure the book must at least be better than his publisher had made it look. When all this was over, Wes decided, he would finally sit down and read it.