There's Something I Want You to Do (25 page)

“Snack food,” the doctor said. “I didn’t really have dinner.”

“Well, I could always heat up something for you. Are you still hungry? There’s some leftover roast in the icebox.” She enjoyed using antiquated words. “Or I could throw together a salad for you.” She refused to follow the Jones Diet Plan and had said so. He shook his head. “Hey, guess what’s going on here?” She gave him a brief and almost unreadable smile.

“I have no idea.”

“We need to go to the basement.” She waited. “We have to go down
there
if I’m going to tell you what’s going on
here
.” She cocked her head at the ceiling. “He might be listening.”

“Rafe?”

“Who else?”

The doctor smelled a trace of gin on his wife’s breath. She gave off an air of late-night melancholy elegance, an effect always intensified by alcohol, both the melancholy and the elegance. As she made her way toward the basement door entrance, her slippers shuffled on the linoleum, and her hips under the bathrobe swayed a little, a touch of womanly swagger intensified by the gin. Her expensively cut hair was streaked with gray, and her hair swayed with the same rhythm as her hips. He didn’t want the younger version of Susan back—he did not desire younger women and despised men of his age who did—because a younger woman would leave him alone and untended in middle age, and he wanted to share the process of aging with someone, and not just anybody, but with her.

He felt his love flaring up for her: he remembered exactly how beautiful she looked when they first met years ago in San Francisco and saw how she appeared to the world now, the result of what their lives together had done to her, and the two versions of her, the young and the…well, she wasn’t
old,
exactly,
weathered
was maybe a better word, touched him with an electric intensity that made it hard for him to breathe. How he loved her! He even loved her sadness. But loving your wife’s sadness was a soul-error. Everyone said so.

She flipped on the light for the basement stairs and descended slowly, turning her feet at an angle so that she wouldn’t slip on the narrow steps. At the bottom she flicked on another light. He followed her, trying to see the stairs over the mound of his belly. Her canned preserves lined the shelves behind her, fresh this past summer from the cauldron of the pressure cooker, including the stewed tomatoes in mason jars that sometimes started to ferment and caused the jars to explode. He remembered reading the paper one evening and hearing a canned-tomato bomb go off underneath him. When he had gone downstairs to inspect the damage, shards of glass and stewed tomatoes were strewn all over the basement floor. It looked like a crime scene.

“How was your day?” she asked without interest. “Any hallucinat
ions?”

“No. Just the usual can of worms.” He was puffing from the exertion. At last he shrugged. “No. A little
better
than the usual worms.”

“Remind me,” she said, “to have someone come down here and inspect this place for mold. I smell mold.”

“Okay.” He noticed that she faced slightly away from him, though her right hand played with the fingers of his left hand, an old habit. She toyed with his wedding ring. He often felt that she was inspecting him.

“What’s this about?” he asked, as the furnace rumbled to life. “How come we’re down here?”

“What’s
what
about?”

“Why we’re down here.”

“Oh. Down here?” She had grown terribly absentminded. Maybe it was the gin. “Oh, yes, of course.” She nodded, a bit too forcefully, though she was still facing away from him. “Okay, so brace yourself. It seems that we were grandparents for, I don’t know, about four weeks. Well, I mean, virtual grandparents, because, well, you get the picture.”

“I do? No, I think I don’t get the picture. What picture is this? Does this have to do with Jupie?”

“Bingo.” She nodded and then wiped her eyes on her bathrobe sleeve. Jupie was their son, Rafe’s girlfriend
—though Jupie was Eli and Susan’s private name for this girlfriend whose actual name was Donna. A serious martial artist in tae kwon do, Rafe also considered himself a Marxist and had met this girl at a downtown political rally for voting rights or whatever. She was a freshman at Macalester, and although she was a year older than he was, her political activism matched his. They had hooked up soon after they met, and she had attended his matches and cheered him on. An attractive young woman with long brown hair, big brown eyeglasses to match, and a habit of chewing on her lip after she said anything, she nevertheless had an essential blurriness to her, which had provoked the doctor, after one of her visits to the house when she and their son had engaged him in conversation about gender identity, to call her Jupiter, not because she was godlike but because she resembled a gas planet. You’d go down through the layers of gas with her, and you never got to anything solid.

Her well-meaning earnestness had a certain charm. All it lacked was specific content.

By contrast, Rafe was all specific content. His body had a wiry density: when he moved, he seemed not to walk but to float, his movements all perfectly coordinated. When sparring, he showed absolutely no mercy, and his face showed an utter lack of expression. Watching him, his father felt pride and wonder. Well, he himself had been a fighter once.

Of course teens were hazy because life was still hazy to them, but this Donna, this Jupiter, was a mistress of the unspecific. Political platitudes and unsubstant
iated generaliza
tions just came leaking out of her. Besides, their son was still in high school, a senior. Big political rhetoric turned him on.

“Actually,” Susan said, “we’ve got to stop calling her that. Her name’s Donna. If Rafe ever catches us calling her Jupie again, he’ll pitch a fit.”

“So…”

“So I guess he forgot about condoms one time, or they got careless, but anyway he got her knocked up, unbeknownst to us, and also, equally unbeknownst to us, they went off to Planned Parenthood last week.” This sentence came out of Susan in pieces, severed into parts. Elijah took his wife into his arms and felt his old damaged heart breaking again, momentarily. “After all,” his wife said into his shirt, “she’s eighteen. Or nineteen. Old enough anyway to get an abortion.”

“When did he tell you?”

“This evening. And here’s the thing. He’s been crying all afternoon. The poor kid. His crying is contagious. And…I don’t know. You don’t expect a tough young man to be torn up about it. You don’t expect the fathers to cry.”

“You don’t?” He waited. “
I
do.”

She just looked at him, through the tears.

“But anyway Rafe’s not generic,” he said. “He’s not one of ‘the men.’ He’s not one of ‘the fathers.’ Rafe is himself. Of course he’d cry. Jesus, the poor kid.”

“I’d rather,” she said, stiffening, “I’d rather you didn’t lecture me about him. I believe that I know him as well as you do.” She paused for effect. “If not better.”

The doctor still held on to her. “Let’s not fight,” he said. “What should I do? Should I go talk to him?”

“Yes, but don’t lecture him, okay?”

“I
don’t
lecture.”

“Of course you do. You hold forth. You get started, and once you get going, you’re like an oscillating fan. Wisdom spews out of you in all directions.”

Sorrow had made her cruel this evening. The doctor felt hungry again, terribly hungry, mealless, and he removed his bulky arms from where they had been encircling his wife and dropped them to his sides.

He trudged upstairs to sit with his son. At the top, he stopped for breath. He would sit down on Rafe’s unmade bed, where conception had recently taken place. On the walls and shelves above them, the trophies and medals for his tae kwon do competitions would be on display. The smell of teenage boy would pervade the room: sweat, pizza, musk, and drugstore aftershave would be mixed together in there. Somewhat uninvited and slightly unwelcome, the doctor would just go on sitting there until something happened or nothing did. With another man in the room, Rafe would stop crying and collect himself. Rafe was devoted to benign authority: when sparring, he always bowed deeply and crisply and always walked away from his instructor backward. He had never gone through a rebellious, obnoxious phase and wouldn’t start now.

The doctor would wait patiently with the young man, his son, who had fathered a child, “sired” one, that old strange verb that people now applied only to pedigreed dogs. Anyway, patience being one of his gifts, maybe the best of them, he would listen as his son lectured him on progressive politics and tae kwon do and werewolf fiction, his three great passions, as he recovered his composure. Donna, the boy’s girlfriend, was in fourth place when it came to the passions, although the boy did not yet realize where she stood in his hierarchies. Only his father did. Poor thing, she would disappear eventually. They would all get over this.

—

Elijah’s wife had written a story with Jupie in it. She had always had ambitions as a writer and had joined a downtown writers’ organization called Scriveners’ Ink, where she attended a workshop once a week led by a young woman, a recent MFA graduate.

Susan had shyly shown the story, entitled “Like Father Unlike Son,” to her husband. In the story she had written, there is a young woman whose boyfriend is a sweet-tempered but infatuated adolescent male dupe. The girlfriend leads him around from one political meeting to another. The story is narrated by the boy’s mother, who is not afraid to label her athlete son (a football player) to his face as “pussy-whipped”—the accusation is meant in good fun. The boy’s father, a balding and overweight criminal lawyer given to pronouncem
ents, provides comic relief and a regular income but somehow is not sufficiently supportive of his wife emotionally. He’s too wrapped up in his work, it seems. Near the end of the story, as he crosses the street near his office, he is struck down by a Prius driven by an angry former client named Nancy, seeking revenge. This melodramatic touch at the story’s climax leaves the boy’s mother and the boy alone together, with the girlfriend, named Venus, now out of the picture, or forgotten, following the lawyer’s painful death from internal bleeding. Together, in the story’s last paragraph, the boy and his mother engage in troubled speculation about their future.