Famous Builder (20 page)

Perhaps I just think that love—like wars, or hunger—is something that happens to other people.

Just as I’m putting my guitar back in its case, my father stands at my door in the orange jumpsuit he wears while working on the car, a caged flashlight in his left hand. Once again, he’s fixing the car that we worked on together weeks ago. His face—ashy, unshaved, with new gray whiskers about the jaw—is smeared with two bars of axle grease below the left cheek. I tense, thinking I’m going to be summoned to help.

“Is that a church song?” he asks.

He smiles; his voice glints with a sharp edge. He knows that I haven’t said three words about the liturgical album proposal ever since Lawrence Nilsen’s call, that I’ve been willing myself to think of anything but. Simply put, he suggests that I’m giving myself over to pleasure, when, if I were truly hard working and disciplined, I’d be engaged right now in the hardest possible project, as he is at the moment by working on his car. I should be in front of my new four-track recorder (which hasn’t gotten much use, I’m ashamed to tell) rehearsing passages from the songs over and over until my throat feels as if it’s been rubbed raw with steel wool. And the second I fall back on the bed, telling myself that I can’t go on anymore, I should get right back up to the mike, breathe calmly, with sureness, and start all over again.

“Don’t forget to practice.” On the other side of the wall, Michael’s back to playing the opening measure of “Carmina Burana” again.

“I can sing those songs with my socks stuffed in my mouth,” I mumble.

My father picks up the copy of
New York Tendaberry
on the bureau and studies the cover. Laura bundled up on a street corner, eyes closed, chin raised in defiance, black hair flying in the wind.

“What, you don’t think I’m going to do a good job?”

Of course I’m asking for it. I know I’m practically begging him to say something thoughtless, slightly cruel, in order to feel superior: to let him know he’s offended me. I say, “Daddy?”

“Of course you’ll do a good job.” He puts the album down. But there’s something hidden inside his smile. It’s both playful and aggressive, like splashing someone at the beach who’s been shirtless in the hot sun.

“You know what you’re doing,” he says.

“Daddy!”
I yell.

I look at him, challenging, but there’s only blue, weary sadness in his eyes. Why is it that we always manage to misunderstand, to misconnect these days? We don’t seem to be able to get ourselves out of these roles we perform—the ruthless father and the touchy, unpredictable, self-righteous son. We know it’s more complicated than that between us. And if his words are sometimes marbled, I can’t stop fixing my attention on their darker sides, as if they should be truer, should mean more than his lightness and his love.

Two hours later, the four of us are seated at the kitchen table. Jimmy Carter’s face appears on the TV, which prompts my father’s usual derisive imitation: “Jimmy Cah-tah.” I’m not sure what sets me off: either it’s his notion that the military should storm the embassy in Tehran, forgoing the hostages’ welfare, or it’s the lingering effect of his walking into my room earlier. But something’s been building inside me for hours, and I’m seized suddenly with the notion that I barely exist, that I’m fleshless, that if I don’t open my mouth within a matter of ten seconds, I’m going to evaporate, fizz like a drop of water in a saucepan on high heat.

“I hate that school. I’m dropping out of that fucking school.”

The skin around my mother’s mouth tightens. She makes a small pit in the mashed potatoes on her plate with the back of her spoon.

“What do you plan to do?” she says.

I pause, emptied.

“Paul?” says my mother.

“I have to move to Los Angeles.”

Everything stills outside: the pin oak leaves, the blue-jay’s plunge toward the rooftop. Then the three of them break into laughter.

“What’s so funny?”

My father reaches for the gravy boat, then knocks it, splashing the tablecloth. He slams a butter knife down beside his plate. “Tell me how you’re going to live. You tell me how you’re going to feed yourself.”

“I’ll make do.”

They look back at me with slackened, hurt faces. For a moment it seems that I could take things in a different direction. Raise the corner of my mouth, open my eyes wider, and the rest of my face wouldn’t have any choice but to respond to that lift. And within a split second, I’d be smiling. And they couldn’t help but smile back. And we’d crack a joke about Mrs. Fox or Dolores Dasher or any of the characters who populate our family’s collective imagination, and we’d know, without uttering a single word, how lucky we were to have one another, to share our wicked, but loving sensibilities. Instead, though, I push my chair back from the table. “I hate you,” I say calmly, with clarity. I grab my jacket, walk toward the back door with the firmest footsteps I can muster, and make sure to rattle the closest doors in their frames.

My heart’s beating so hard that it hurts. I’d reach inside my ribs to rip it out of my chest if I thought such a thing were possible. In the yard behind us, the Lennoxes—Tommy, Cathy, Kimmy—play flag football in the dark, thin yellow tails flapping behind their pants pockets in the wind. They pretend not to have heard a thing, but their averted faces tell me they’ve listened to every word.

The night’s colder than I expected: steam funnels from my open mouth. I walk around the perimeter of the Circle Lane cul-de-sac and see huge, flamboyant moths—are they swallows? bats?—diving beneath the streetlight beside the Spadeases’ driveway. I trudge back toward Willowdale Drive, then farther and farther outside Boundbrook. Mews Lane, Lane of Trees, Leith Hill, East Riding Drive. I march down the streets, surprised by the how different the houses look on foot. Here, even in the dark, I see everything: the oil stains rainbowing the driveways; the bronzing pachysandra, the dewberry; the thinned-out rhododendrons with their stripped lower branches.

How could I have told them that I hated them?

I stop at the corner of North Riding Drive and Mill-house Lane to tie a double knot in my left shoe. Where will I sleep? I look over my shoulder and catch a glimpse of the nearest house. Lights spangle the Japanese maples outside the window. Inside the kitchen the mother wipes down the countertop. She looks down at her son, who walks up to her with his homework. Once she gives him an answer that satisfies him, she goes back to her task with such attention and pleasure, working circles with her arm, that I can’t help but imagine myself in her skin, living inside her house. I put down the sodden sponge as I walk toward the family room, where I sit on the couch and lean into my son’s shoulder, my mouth practically touching his ear. To turn oneself to the world. To live without the burden of death informing every gesture. She doesn’t worry her time in the vain, vain hope that something she might make could outlive her. She doesn’t need to prove that she’s real. Not just an inkling: a drop of water, a pool of light beneath a lamp shade.

***

Running, panting, banging my suitcase against the hall of my quad. Somewhere north of the Havre de Grace Bridge an electric problem stops my train for an hour, and now I’m late to Madame Sommerfeldt’s 12:45 Introduction to French I class. My door’s propped open. Boxes and Hefty bags are spread out all over my bedspread. My songbooks have been taken out of their box, and the Farrah Fawcett-Majors poster is rolled into a pipe. There’s no sign of Dough anywhere. How the hell could he do this to the room—and to leave it unlocked, for that matter—without checking with me first? I’m about to holler, to pound on the doors of the other rooms in the quad when a wide, slow-eyed boy in a stained orange sweatshirt and a carbohydrate pudge about the chin and neck walks toward me with a box.

“Would you mind, pal?” he says affably, handing the box to me.

He affixes a Grateful Dead sticker to the wall. Inside the box: a can of Play-Doh, a sugar bear magnet, a baby spoon, and a magazine titled
Jugs, Shakers and Headlights
that features a blond woman in a leather vest, who grins over her shoulder as she spreads her naked butt over the wide seat of a motorcycle. The box has a vulnerable, human smell like a drawerful of sweaters that hasn’t been opened in five months.

“Where’s Doug?”

“Where to put all this stuff.
Mom.
” He looks at me confusedly for a second, blinks, smiles, then plunks down on the opposite bed. His eyes roll back just slightly in his head, the whites visible beneath brown irises, lids fluttering. He feels around for imaginary walls. “Time for a snooze,” he declares. And with a single flourish of his arm, he pushes something off the mattress, and white plastic spoons spill out all over the floor.

There’s a crick between my shoulder blades, a spur between the vertebrae of my neck. A wind blows down the slope behind the building, puffing out the curtains, which are ripped, mysteriously, the hem mended with duct tape. Am I angry? Surely, I should have been warned that I was getting a new roommate, that I’d have to get used to someone else’s habits. As usual, though, the school seems to believe that its students are about as significant as the goldfish inside the tanks of the Woolworth’s over on Old York Road. The guy sits back up, using the edge of my guitar case as his footstool. The vision in my left eye blurs: I know how vicious I must look by the swift way he removes his shoes.

“You play the guitar?” he says.

What am I bottling up inside me these days? “I’m sorry.”

He holds up two hands and rattles them. “Listen, if we’re going to live together, you need to tell me what’s what. No feet on the guitar case, asswipe!” He laughs a brusque nervous chortle, then leans farther back on the bed, sighs, fingers joined behind his head. He blows a thin stream of air across his lower lip, practically vibrating the skin. “Play something.”

I pause for a moment. Already Madame Sommerfeldt must be going around the room, demanding conjugations of the most irregular sort. I know I should make my way down the hill, but for some reason, I reach for my guitar. I play elongated, awkward shapes, as if my left hand alone is doing yoga. It’s not much of anything, really, just a series of three chords too complicated to name, but the guy listens with such intensity and care, chin jutting forward, brows raised till the skin above his nose crinkles in vertical lines that I somehow manage to pluck the strings with more nuance and feeling than I ever thought possible.

He pants a little. “You ought to be in a band.”

When I tell him that I’m a singer/songwriter who plays in nightclubs, who’s—pause, deep breath: should I tell him this?—preparing to record my first album in a matter of weeks, his eyes dim, before his face glows a healthy red. I know exactly what that head holds; it’s the same look I turned toward Amy Goldfin not long ago, and I try to receive that intense light, to take in what it expects and demands of me, without turning on my heels, and stampeding down the hall.

“A singer/songwriter? Like Bruce? That’s absolutely fantastic. Let me shake your hand, man.”

***

“You packed your toothpaste?”

“Mother—” I say, expelling air. Outside the car window, the split-levels of Haddontowne twinkle with lights and electric menorahs in the windows. It’s 6:45 in the morning. Christmas has already come and gone. Flurries swirl. We drive toward the sky blue towers of the Walt Whitman Bridge (I think of upside-down tuning forks) and Philadelphia International. Up ahead, traffic thickens, brake lights glowing red in the cars and trucks.

“What about your shampoo? Did you see where I left it?” She eases her foot off the accelerator and turns in my direction. “You left it on the bed, I bet.”

I close my eyes. “I’m trying not to throw up. I told you I was sick. You’re not helping one bit.”

She clicks on the turn signal and pulls onto the on-ramp of the North-South Freeway. “You’re not that nervous.”

“You sound like Daddy.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“What?”

“Stop telling me how I feel.”

She turns off the “Moonlight Sonata” on WHYY and aims toward the cash lane of the tollbooth. “What’s there to be afraid of?”

I sink lower in the passenger seat and exhale an extended, ragged breath. She phrases the question with such concern and sincerity that I can’t help but be hushed. “Okay,” I say. “Imagine agreeing to make an album of liturgical songs you’ve written when you’re not even certain that you believe in them anymore, when you’ve moved into another life.”

It’s the first time I’ve uttered such a thing aloud, or even to myself. My words leave a ghost of a smell, like a lemony dust cloth that’s just been shaken out in a tight interior space. I crank open the car window to let in the frosty air.

She says, “You don’t believe in God?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Oh, honey,” she says in a heavy voice.

A ship’s horn in the river below, a humming bass; it reverberates against the winter sky like a struck tuning fork. We’re silent. Then just by looking at the fullness of her lower lip, the soft glow of her forehead, I can tell that she’s kicking herself for not booking a ticket on the plane with me. It wouldn’t be entirely unlike her to meet me on the other side of the country, at the gate in San Jose, with the shampoo and toothpaste she’s convinced herself I’ve left behind. And then I’m reminded of the time she followed my brothers and me thirty miles from the shore house to the Cape May–Lewes Ferry terminal. There we were, standing high on the third deck, waiting for the workers to untie the ropes, and there she was below, running toward the stern past the other cars in line. She held up a tiny white bottle. “Paul!” she cried. “You forgot your saline solution.”

“I’ll be fine, Mom,” I say now.

“You’ll be
wonderful.
I know it, I feel it.”

“Thank you.”

“Daddy and I are so, so proud of you.”

And that’s enough to keep me going for a while. An hour and a half later: liftoff. My left cheek presses into the blue plastic lining around the airplane window; the houses and streets of Cherry Hill, Voorhees, and Evesham fall away. There’s the angular Towers of Windsor Park, the emptied aqua tub of the Woodcrest swimming pool. There’s Temple BethEl, the St. Thomas More Parish Center, the model houses of Elysium, Chanticleer, The Beagle Club, and Charter Oak, a hidden gravel pit that might have been dug out with a teaspoon. How tender it all looks from this height. No Mafia slayings in the middle of the night, no impossibly bored teenagers setting brushfires in the orchards. Why can’t this be enough for me? Why is it that I spend every last bit of my energy trying to change my life, and when the possibility of change finally comes my way, I don’t take it as a gift, but make myself sick with worry, scrabbling like a raccoon caught in a garbage can, frantic that I’m only going to lose, lose? I see the floors of my childhood bedroom filling up with clusters of dust, the shirts and coats in my closet stiffening with age on their hangers. And hasn’t my family already stopped bringing up my name? There’s Michael ascending the steps of the high-school stage to warm applause. My parents’ eyes well. I see the Cherry Hill Inn, Irv Morrow’s Hideaway, the boxwoods at McNaughton’s Nursery like little rows of garnish, and think all it would take would be the simplest thing, a fire, an ice storm, a bomb dropped.