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handsome as me.
 No chance of that. I tightened my grasp.
 Dad liked them too. I chose them for him, you know.
I nodded, remember, smiling a little, though he couldn t see me.
 He s a little drunk, isn t he? He s taking a shower? Maybe that ll sober
him up. Toby s voice was tolerant, amused.  He was a success tonight,
wasn t he? He muffled a yawn by pressing his open mouth to my shoulder.
 I m really tired. Will you ask him to come in and say good night? I won t
lock the door.
 All right, Toby. Good night. Sleep well. I kissed his forehead and let him
go. I don t often need to say it, but I said it:  I love you, Toby.
Surprised by my sentiment, Toby grinned. His glasses glinted with amuse-
ment.  Dads always love their kids, he said;  tell me something new. Then
he hugged me again, quickly, clumsily.  I love you too, Allen. Good night.
Sweet dreams.
Closing the door behind him, I heard the shower shut off and went to
stand in the bathroom door. Jeremy pulled back the shower curtain an-
other Anglo-Indian chintz, printed to look like crewel work and stepped
out onto the bath mat. I handed him a towel. He was wet and gleaming,
drops of water sparkling in his chest hair and beard, he was chunky, a little
soft, working on becoming middle aged, his skin was pale as old ivory and
his eyes as pale as steel. When he turned his back to me, his wet hair hung
below his shoulder blades.  Your son, I told him,  just called me his dad.
 Well, of course. Jeremy turned around again.  Goes without saying. He
held the towel out to me so I could wrap it around him and he could wrap
his arms around me.  Or did you think you were his uncle? he said, mischie-
vous, young as his son.  Hello, Allen, he said, and closed his large hands on
my hips, pulling us together.  Are you thinking what I m thinking?
Probably not, I thought, holding him the same way I would hold Toby
or Kit, my sons, marveling at their preciousness. Something so valuable
should not be so solid, so large, so real.  Tell me, I said.
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Charlotte, North Carolina: July 1990
T
H
E
What s wrong with this picture.
S
Here they are, the family, walking through the garden behind the
A
house: mother, father, son, son s spouse, two grandchildren. The
lawn is cleanly mown. Narrow borders along brick paths brim with F
petunias colored to the stridency of plastic but textured like damp
E
velvet. In the corner of the fence stand camellias decked with pink
blossoms that look dyed, among dark leaves that look waxed. Roses
H
like porcelain teacups, glazed and shining, fat and heavy with scent,
O
lift on sturdy stems from shapely bushes. The mother, who believes
U
her son to be barely convalescent, offers her arm for the prom-
enade but he, feeling quite well thank you, prefers to lean against S
his spouse, who offers the mother a shy smile over the crown of the
E
son s head. They understand each other, finally. Lagging behind, the
father and grandchildren chatter happily together, everything to
say and no time to say it.
I started out of sleep when the door,
which we had left unlatched, eased open, but Jeremy only groaned
and turned over in the new guest bed. It barely fit in the room, the
bedroom of my childhood. My father edged around the door. He
grinned as I pulled the sheet up. Carrying a tray with both hands, he
couldn t say anything, couldn t have knocked even had it occurred
to him. Good morning, I said, leaning up against the headboard. It s
early.
He wagged his chin at the tray, prettily set up with morning coffee
for two. A single nougat-pink camellia blossom floated in a shallow
glass bowl. Having set the tray on the bedside table, my father turned
to me and shrugged and said, I ve seen naked men before, Allen, I ve
seen you naked.
Momentarily I felt foolish with the sheet drawn over my chest. Not
recently, Dad. It s not pretty.
Would you rather I not know? He sat down on the bed beside me.
You re my son. I can t be more afraid than I am already. Then he
placed his hand on my shrouded knee, his lips bent into a smile but
his eyes not smiling.
I held out my left arm, turned up so that he could see the stains
like spattered blueberry syrup on the tender flesh inside the elbow,
then allowed the sheet to slip down to my waist. Like the negative
of a photograph of the night sky, the skin over rib cage and breast,
nearly as pale as the cream-colored sheet, was pitted with a constel-
lation of lesions. In the full-length mirror in the walk-in closet back
home, when I changed clothes after work, sometimes I would try to
286
connect the dots into a coherent pattern, but never could. Perhaps if I saw
them as they were, not inverted in the glass, I might divine the emblematic
figure. His hand trembling gently, my father reached out, pulled back, said,
You re so thin, Allen! Do they hurt?
His eyes glimmered like moonlight on windblown water. I shook my
head.
He reached forward again, his hand forming the paralytic claw of a much
older man, and lightly pressed first one finger, then a second and a third
against the three small blemishes where the chest hollowed into the left
shoulder. The lesions hardly protrude above the surface of the skin, less
than a blood blister might, and to the touch are indistinguishable. For my
part I felt the pressure of my father s fingertips but as though distantly,
through a topical anesthesia, as if the nerves were paralyzed although not
yet dead. How many? he asked.
Twenty-seven.
No change, then.
No change. I m hardly aware of watching the hands of someone who talks
to me, any more than one consciously listens to each phoneme when some-
one speaks, but the eloquent flatness of this gesture struck me, a phrase
admitting no development. No change, I began to say again.
My father grabbed my hands out of the air, pressed them together be-
tween his own and pressed them against his chest as he leaned forward to
kiss my cheek. Bending further, forcing the bones of our forearms against
each other so that mine hurt, he had kissed two of the dry sores before I
could push him away.
He released my hands but wouldn t look into my eyes. You re my son,
Allen, he said, I love you, his hands as firm and sure as ever in my childhood.
Don t get up, have your coffee first.
Jeremy had slept through it all, nor did he wake when my father latched
the door behind him. Jeremy s invariable reaction to a strange bed is to lie
wakeful several hours before falling into impermeable, dreamful sleep. The
coffee was in a covered pot and would remain warm. I settled down closer
to the breathing, living body beside me in the bed. Never before had I seen
tears in my father s eyes. I closed my eyes but still felt the light that poured
through the sheer, blowing curtains, and still felt the heat of the sun through
the window. Not since I was a small child had my father touched my naked
skin. Nor could I recall being touched in quite that definite, physical fashion. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]