The Affinities (4 page)

Despite hard times there was still a “good” part of Schuyler, where the town's diminishing stock of prosperous families kept house: families like the Fisks, the Symanskis, the Cassidys, the Muellers. The windows of their houses glittered as if their wealth had been compressed into rectilinear slabs of golden light, and the houses seemed to promise ease, comfort, safety, all the consolations of family—though this was often false advertising.

I pulled into the driveway of my father's house and parked next to Aaron's Lexus and behind my father's Lincoln Navigator. The same comforting light spilled out of the house's windows, painting the rain-slick leaves of the willow in the yard. But no one was happy inside. The family crowded around as I came through the door: my father, my brother, my stepmother Laura. Twelve-year-old Geddy stood behind Mama Laura, and when I approached him he offered his hand with a solemnity that might have been funny under other circumstances. I noticed his hair had been cut into a military-style buzz, probably as a result of my father's crusades to make Geddy “more masculine.” I had been the subject of my father's attention often enough that I recognized the symptoms.

“We waited dinner for you,” Mama Laura said. “Come in and wash up. Geddy'll take your suitcase up to your room, won't you, Geddy?”

Geddy seemed pleased to take charge of the duffel bag into which I had thrown a couple of changes of clothes. “Thanks,” I said.

“Don't be too long,” my father said. He hadn't changed since the last time I'd seen him. Same crisp blue shirt, same crumpled black tie loose around the collar. He was a tall man, but not fat. People said I looked like him, and I guessed I did, but the only time I saw the resemblance was when I was tired or angry. As if some perpetual discontent had left its mark on his face.

At the table we didn't talk about Grammy Fisk—at least not right away. We had had the essentials of that conversation already, by phone. A second health crisis had awakened Granny Fisk in the small hours of the night, one that had nothing to do with her gallbladder. This time, Grammy Fisk hadn't apologized for the trouble she was putting everyone to, hadn't insisted on getting dressed before the EMT guys showed up. She had woken up unable to move or feel the right side of her body; she was blind in one eye; her speech was slurred and indistinct; and she could communicate nothing but a groaning, awful terror.

By the time she reached Onenia County Hospital she had lost consciousness. Scans revealed massive intracranial bleeding—a stroke, in other words. She had been comatose for the last two days, and while my father couldn't bring himself to say it (“Prospects don't look so good” was the closest he could come), she wasn't expected to recover. The hospital had promised to call if there was any change in her condition; we would all drive there in the morning to keep vigil by her bed.

“Not that she seems to notice,” my father added. “I don't think she knows we're even there, to tell the truth.”

Mama Laura had prepared a huge meal, including sweet potatoes in brown sugar and roast chicken, but no one had much appetite, least of all me. We watched each other pick at our plates. At forty-two, ten years younger than my father, Mama Laura still had the timid demeanor she had brought to the family when she married him: an instinctive caution that showed in her body language and in her face, always turned a shy quarter-angle away. Concealed under this deference was a genuine love of the work that embedded her in the family. We could have afforded all kinds of help, but Mama Laura refused to consider hiring a maid or a cook. It was not that she thought of herself as a servant. She expected to be appreciated for what she did. But it was also her way of demonstrating her right to be among us. She fed us and cleaned our house, and that entitled her to a certain non-negotiable minimum of respect, both for herself and for her son Geddy. Tonight she gazed forlornly at the platters of untouched food on the table, though she had taken little of it herself.

“All that trouble in the South China Sea,” my father said, “and the Persian Gulf. It's not doing our business any good. Or this town.”

That was his idea of something neutral to talk about. He aimed his remarks at my older brother, Aaron. Aaron sat next to me, shoulders squared, knife and fork poised over his plate—Aaron's appetite seemed relatively intact. And as always, he knew what was expected of him. “The Chinese,” he said, nodding, “the fucking Saudis…”

The dynamic was so familiar I hardly had to listen to the rest of it: my father's opinions, amplified by my brother. Not that Aaron was faking it. He shared my father's conviction that America was a fallen Eden and that what lay beyond its gates was a wilderness of veniality, poverty, and low cunning. Mama Laura spoke up once, to ask me if I wanted more mashed potatoes. I thanked her, but no.

“How are your courses coming?” she asked during a lull.

“Not bad.”

“I can't imagine how that works. I mean graphic design school. Do you draw a lot of pictures?”

“There's a little more to it than that.”

“I'm sure there must be.”

Aaron and my father exchanged impatient glances and went back to the subject of the Middle East, the skyrocketing price of oil. I looked at Geddy, who was sitting across from me, but Geddy's attention was entirely focused on his plate, where he was rearranging his food without eating much of it. He looked tired. His face was bloated. He was easily frightened, and his best defense, now as ever, was to retreat into himself. Grammy Fisk had always been kind to Geddy, as she had always been kind to me—what would Geddy do without her? His mother would look after him, but who would
understand
him?

We all turned in after the living room clock chimed eleven. I slept in the room that had been mine for years. I raised the sash of the window an inch or so. The rain had come through Onenia County with a cold front on its heels, and the breeze that lifted the hem of the curtain was fresh and moist. Every sound was familiar: the front-yard willow tossing in the wind, rainwater gushing from the downspouts, the four-cornered echo of a known space. It was the rest of the house that felt hollowed-out, heartless.

In the morning we went to visit Grammy Fisk.

*   *   *

We camped out in the visitor's lounge and took turns spending time with her. I went into the room after my father and Aaron left it.

Grammy Fisk was unresponsive, and a doctor had told us as diplomatically as possible that there was very little higher brain function going on, but it was still possible—or so we told ourselves and pretended to believe—that she might be aware of our presence. I doubted it as soon as I saw her. Grammy Fisk wasn't in that room. It was her body on the bed all right, intubated and monitored, her cheeks sunken where her dentures had been removed (an indignity she would never have tolerated), but she was gone. Just plain gone. When I took her hand it felt inert, like something made out of pipe cleaners and papier-m
â
ch
é
.

Still, I thanked her for everything she had given me. Which was much. Not least, the idea that I might not be entirely alone in the world.

*   *   *

Jenny Symanski arrived at the hospital late in the afternoon. We hugged, but there was time for only a few words before Jenny spent a few minutes of her own with Grammy Fisk. While we waited, Mama Laura hinted that it would be all right if I took Jenny out to dinner. The rest of the family would make shift with the hospital commissary, but she thought Jenny deserved something a little classier now that I was back in town. And I agreed.

We took my car. I drove Jenny away from the hospital, past the outlet malls and down the old main street of Schuyler, to what had been our hangout for years, a Chinese restaurant called Smiling Dragon. Green linoleum floors, a desperately unhealthy ficus in the window, no pretensions.

Jenny's dad had been my father's friend and drinking partner for more than thirty years. Both had started out with a modest family grubstake, and both had achieved modest fortunes by Onenia County standards. Jenny's dad owned a vast acreage of hardscrabble farmland north of town, which he had developed into housing tracts and strip malls during Schuyler's better days; my father had turned the hardware store he inherited into a statewide chain of Fisk's Farm Supply outlets. The families had grown up together. I had spent a lot of time at Jenny's place when we were younger, until her mother's alcoholism made my presence there uncomfortable; after that, Jenny had become an honorary Fisk.

Jenny and I talked about Grammy Fisk over egg rolls. “She was always the family beatnik,” I said. “She showed me her high school yearbook one time. Class of fifty-seven. Some school in Allentown.” Which was where my grandfather had found her, a few years later, tending a booth at the Allentown Fair. “She was pretty amazing looking, actually. Long black hair, lots of attitude. She dropped out of state college and spent a couple of years doing the bohemian thing—big into folk music, at least until she got married, and even then she would sometimes sneak out to shows with her old girlfriends. There were all these ticket stubs tucked into her photo album.”

“Seriously? She never mentioned any of that to me.”

For obvious reasons. My grandfather had venerated Barry Goldwater, and there had never been a word of dissent from Grammy Fisk. By the time my father was born, her Charlie Parker and Bob Dylan records had gone into permanent storage. But she saw things the other Fisks were blind to. If the world was a puzzle, she was drawn to the pieces that didn't fit. “You know how she was.”

“Yeah.”

Jenny was five-foot-three in stocking feet and dressed as if she wanted to be ignored: jeans and a cotton shirt and blond hair tied back so tightly it hurt to look at. A mouth that gave out smiles like party favors but had been made somber by Grammy Fisk's illness. She cocked her head at me. “How are you really doing, up there in Canada? And what happened to your face?”

I told her about the incident at the demo. At the end she said, “So are you a cop-hating lefty now?”

“Honestly? What I remember about that cop is how he looked. Pissed off, obviously, you know, all wound up, but also scared. Like what he did to me was something he might not be proud of. Maybe something he wouldn't mention when he went home to his wife.”

“Or maybe he was just an asshole.”

“Maybe.”

“He had a choice. He could have told you to move on.”

“Sure, but the situation was pushing him hard in one direction. Which made me think about how fucked up and really arbitrary it is, the way we conduct ourselves with other people. There has to be a better way.” And because this was Jenny, to whom I could say almost anything, I told her I had taken the Affinity test.

After a pause she said, “Those Affinity groups … they're what, some kind of dating service?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” I explained about Meir Klein and InterAlia. “Basically, I was tired of not having anybody to talk to except a couple of guys from my classes at Sheridan.”

“So they sort of design a social circle for you?”

“Not exactly, but yeah, you end up with a bunch of new friends.”

“Uh-huh. And it really works?”

“Supposedly. I don't know yet.”

“Well, well, well.” Which was classic Jenny. It meant,
I don't like what I'm hearing but I'm not prepared to argue about it.
“Maybe
I
should join one of those groups.”

“There might not be any in Schuyler just yet.”

“Mm. Bad luck for you, then. When you move back home.”

“Which won't be anytime soon.”

Her eyebrows went up. “But I thought—”

“What?”

“With Grammy Fisk and all—”

“I'll be here a few days more, but I can't stay much longer than that. I need to set up a summer internship, for one thing.”

“But Grammy Fisk was paying your tuition.”

Because my father had refused to. He didn't approve of what he called my “artistic side,” and he considered any degree that wasn't an MBA a concession to limp-wristed liberalism. But Grammy Fisk had fought him on that one. She couldn't dictate how he spent his money, but she had money of her own, and she had been determined to spend it on my education, even if that caused trouble in the family—which it
needn't
, she inevitably added, if my father would take a step back and allow her to do her youngest grandson this simple favor. What was wrong with Adam setting out on a career of his own, even if it
did
involve drawing pictures?

Jenny put her hand over mine. “I've been at the house. I hear the talk. I don't know what arrangements Grammy Fisk might have made. But she's not legally competent anymore. She signed a power of attorney after the gallbladder thing. Your dad's in charge now.”

*   *   *

I drove Jenny home. Visiting hours were over and Grammy Fisk had been left alone with the night nurses and the cleaning staff at Onenia General. Jenny's house, a dozen streets away from my father's, was dark except for a single light in the office above the garage. Ed Symanski must have been awake in there, doing his accounts, maybe reading or watching Netflix. Jenny's mom was probably asleep. “Drunk by eight, dead drunk by ten,” as Jenny had described her. But that didn't preclude the possibility of night events: unprovoked midnight arguments, objects thrown against walls. “You can sleep over at our house tonight,” I said. I knew she had been doing so for the last few days, on the grounds that the Fisks needed a hand with their family crisis.

She shook her head. “I have to be here sometimes. My dad can't handle it all by himself. But thanks.” And we shared a half-hearted kiss.

*   *   *

Back at the house I checked my phone for messages and found an email from a name I didn't recognize: Lisa Wei.