Over strawberry shortcake, Uncle Todd asked Robert about the jobs he was applying for. Robert explained his strategy: do work on the nature side of biology, rather than the medical, up to graduate school.
“If you get one of these jobs, you could live with us for the summer.”
“Really?” Robert looked quickly at Moira.
“Moira’s idea,” said Uncle Todd. “She thinks you’ll be a good influence around here.” He glanced at Lee’s bedroom door. (The cousins had been sent to do homework, which would earn them their share of shortcake.)
Careful to use his napkin, Robert wiped cream off his lips. “But Filo and Lee go to their mom for the summer, right?”
“Well, Filo’s off to that riding camp, but Lee’s going to stay here through mid-August. He’s nearly failing English and social studies, so we’re enrolling him in a kind of summer academy. It’s right around the corner, here in the Slope. There’d be nothing like it in Matlock.”
“We wouldn’t charge you a thing,” said Moira. “You’re family. And I’d get that clunky sewing machine off that desk. All I sew anymore are curtains, and we’ve got plenty. For the moment anyway.” She smiled at Uncle Todd.
Was Robert being signed up as Big Brother? Did it matter? He had practically zero savings. There was no way the stipend from either internship would cover New York expenses. Unfortunately, what this deal might cost him were Aunt Clo’s affection and favor. He’d think about that later.
“Wow,” he said to Moira. “I don’t know what to say.”
The whole changing-partners thing had to be something you never got used to, Robert thought as he pulled García Márquez from his pack and turned down the sheets (daisies!) on the narrow bed. Yet people did it all the time, made the necessary adjustments. Did this handicap his parents, who could barely remember anything before Psych 101 back in college, their fateful assignment as lab partners? (“From lab to life. The first thing we shared was a white rat!” Robert’s dad loved to say.)
The event Robert had dreaded for months finally came to pass: two weeks before, stopping in the Gato for a double dose of brain-revving caffeine and chocolate, he’d seen Clara, at a table with that guy who’d lived down the hall in her freshman dorm. Stuart Something. Tall as a totem pole. Varsity crew. Button-down shirts under wool sweaters straight from a catalog. Christ, he was straight from a catalog. The kind of guy Robert and Clara used to make fun of.
Their linked hands, on the table, framed a plate of carrot cake.
“Hey,” said Stuart Something, spotting him first.
“Yeah. Hey,” said Robert. He didn’t want to look at Clara, but he had to.
“Hi,” she said stiffly. “How’s it going?”
Robert saw Stuart Something, blushing cotton-candy pink, try to withdraw his hands from Clara’s, but she was holding on, making her statement.
“It’s going along just fine,” Robert said. “For you, too, I see.”
His voice shook. Fuck.
She heard it, and her tone softened. “Good to see you.”
“Good. Yeah.” Only by sheer force of will did he manage to get into line at the counter, rather than flee back out to the Yard. He kept his back to her as he paid and moved toward the door. But when he paused to set down the coffee and put away his wallet, he felt her gaze. Turning briefly, hot-faced, he got the message loud and clear: Clara would never forgive him—and why should she? It was way too late even to apologize.
That night, Turo said, “She is now a callus.”
“What?” said Robert.
Turo placed four fingertips on the heel of his opposite hand.
“Each relationship shed leaves a callus, man. Toughens you up.”
“Thanks. I don’t think I ‘shed’ her so much as ran her over a few times and left her for dead.”
“I’m sorry, man. I don’t mean to be cold. Clara was smart. Pretty. Sexy.”
“I know what you’re going to say. Lots more where she came from.”
“You know it’s true, my friend. Something we all learn.”
“Yeah, and I know I have to learn a ton of stuff I am going to hate learning to get any decent job in this cruel world. I know lots of stuff I’d rather not but have to. Don’t you?”
“Indeed I do. The next part is sorting out the stuff that really matters.”
“Turo? Dude? Can we skip the life lectures just for tonight?”
Thankfully, Turo had dropped it.
Robert’s interviews went well. He liked the Adirondack people best—and if he got that job, he’d get to do some fieldwork, collecting water and soil samples, camping out in the woods—so now he didn’t know which he’d rather have. To his surprise, he received no texts from Turo before they left the city. In his free time, Robert went to the new MoMA and the Museum of Sex. He went to Williamsburg one night and stayed out late with a girl from his bioethics class who’d found out he was down there, too. No sizzle, but she was cool. He followed her back to a party at a loft where everybody was dancing and smoking weed. Robert was relieved when she left with another guy. He arrived back at the apartment just as Uncle Todd was getting up Monday morning to go to the gym. (A gym obsession; was that gay?)
“Bet you need coffee. Big-time,” he said, and simply poured an extra cup.
No awkward questions. They ate toaster waffles and shared the New York Times. After Todd left, Robert made breakfast for his cousins while Moira showered and dressed. In a flurry of zipping backpacks, brushing hair, locating boots, they were suddenly gone, leaving Robert blissfully alone. He crashed.
The other two nights, he stayed in the apartment with his cousins, playing games, watching movies. Uncle Todd thanked him for “facilitating two date nights in a single week!”
Yikes. But not gay. Negativo.
“Man, you look bleached, like you’ve been up since I saw you on Friday!” Robert said when his friend got into the car. “No way you are driving.”
Turo grimaced. “I took advantage.”
“Of whom? Half the frosh co-eds at Barnard?”
“No names, amigo. No names.”
“So. No more senza ragazza?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Turo. “I am still free as a condor.”
“Poetic. I can see you’ve been waxing poetic.”
Turo leaned back.
“How’d the interview go?”
Without opening his eyes, Turo said, “They loved me.”
“Don’t they always.”
Turo slept from the Henry Hudson Bridge to the toll plaza at the exit from the Mass. Pike. “Thank you, my friend,” he said quietly when he came to. When Turo was groggy from sleep, the Spanish inflections rose in his speech. Robert would remember, then, how one of the things that had drawn him to Turo in the first place was his unusual history: exotic, though not to be envied.
That night, after they entered the apartment and went their separate ways, Robert pulled his laptop out of his pack and plugged it in. He’d forced himself not to check his e-mail in New York, aware that he had recently become as much an addict to connectedness as the average modern citizen. When he recalled his months off the grid in Costa Rica, sometimes he felt mournful, even depressed. It seemed as if no one—well, not counting Granddad—shared his ambivalence about the dense, sinewed matrix of communication enfolding Robert and everyone he knew. By contast, he thought of his net-shrouded hammock, his tent, the jungle: the industrial symphony of insects at night, monkeys at dawn, birds all day. Was this, too, part of what had drawn him to Turo: nostalgia for life in the tropics?
Predictably, the e-mails were all missable: somebody from chem lab checking an assignment; his mother wondering how his interviews went; his dad sending him (and, according to the address line, 27 more) a joke about Bush and Katrina. Plus three spamlets that had squirreled their way through his filter.
He was about to close up when an IM from Turo flashed onto the screen. Big MnM cmg up. U WILL b pt of it!
Robert sighed. He wond
ered whether, in the utopia Turo pictured, the ways in which to broadcast your words—your voice, images, avatars, aliases, whatever—would increase or decrease. Maybe you had to go off the deep end to find your way toward something simpler, more humble.
18
The women around Ira were losing it. Their grip, their composure, their stamina, their footing—each falling out of balance in some essential way. Begin with Joanna, his high-finance sister, who’d lost her job two months ago and had fallen into major debt, maxing out credit cards on consolation shopping. For the moment, she’d moved back in with their parents, leading to calls of complaint and worry from his mother.
Evelyn was the easiest to deal with: she was simply freaking out about holding E & F’s first auction in this new location. (Freak, as in control freak, was part of her job description, so in a perverse way she was behaving responsibly.) Her first concern was how to situate a party tent on the sloping lawn between the house and the barn. The one truly level bit of land was the fenced area, down near the pond, that held the swings and play equipment, but you could hardly ask young masters of the cosmos to dance in and around the miniature castle-with-moat or duck beneath the monkey bars en route to the hors d’oeuvres.
Her second concern was food. Years ago, this event had been a potluck supper; then, for several auctions in a row, a caterer mom had contributed a lavish spread. When the last of her kids outgrew the school, no one could bear going back to noodle casseroles and vats of gazpacho. Nowadays, someone with bottomless pockets shelled out for professional food. In keeping with the Woodstock theme, the auction committee had wanted “sixties food,” but what did that mean? Sloppy joes and deviled eggs—or tofu stir-fry and eggplant stuffed with barley?
So they’d settled on Thai, from the restaurant in Ledgely, the only place around that served decent food with any kind of panache. (As Marguerite’s mom put it, “Anything Eastern is sixties, right? Siddhartha, TM, sitars …”) Evelyn’s current worry, looking over the approved menu, was that so many dishes included nuts. E & F was a “nut-free zone,” and didn’t this mean they had to honor the ban 24/7?
“I’m sorry, but you cannot have decent pad thai without peanuts,” declared Ezra’s mom, head of the Refreshments Committee, as Ira passed Evelyn’s office on his way out the door.
At least the classroom projects were complete. Heidi had photographed them so that pictures could be uploaded to the online auction catalog Clover would send to all the parents. Ira was pleased with the Birches’ self-portrait milk bottles, tucked in their tall rustic case; as an object, it felt like Joseph Cornell with a dash of Warhol. He had secret hopes that it would outprice the ikat quilt, the decoupage toy chest, and the set of ceramic nesting bowls glazed with footprints and flowers. (Would you really want to eat from a bowl imprinted by actual feet? Hands, okay, but the crinkled feet of dirt-loving, shoe-loathing children?)
“Oh Ira, I’m so glad you’re still here.” Clover stood just inside the door to her tiny office. She looked wan and fretful.
“You okay?” said Ira. “Don’t let this silly auction eat you alive.”
“God, Ira, it’s not the auction. The auction is keeping me from jumping off a cliff. I never thought I’d see cocktail napkins and barware and folding chairs as life preservers, but that’s the pathetic truth.”
He had no choice but to step into her office and ask what would tempt her to jump off a cliff—even though he could already guess.
The walls of the tiny room were crazy-quilted with charts and lists pertaining to the Big Event. The only window, a perfect circle, contained a view of the house and the lawn. It hadn’t occurred to Ira till now that if, in the course of a day, Clover wanted visual relief from her work, her only resort was to look at her childhood home. Claustrophobic or what?
“My husband got married, just went ahead and did it.”
Ira ignored the absurdity of her statement. “That must feel awful.”
“And the worst fucking thing is that I had to hear it from my own sister. Or her husband.” Clover laughed bitterly. “Actual, not ex.”
She told him how she’d summoned the courage to ask her brother-in-law’s advice on mediation for custody. She was running out of money to pay a lawyer, and now it turned out—again, her sister knew this first!—that she wouldn’t even have her son for the usual two months of summer. Without consulting her, Todd had enrolled him in some tutorial program.
Her eyes filled with tears. “And get this. My nephew—Robert, you know him; Robert who I always thought was completely on my side—is going to be living with them in New York!”
Ira saw her plaintive look and knew what it meant. She wanted him to call Anthony to her rescue. “Clover, I’m so sorry. That sucks. But Robert will be hanging out with his cousins, remember that, and he’s one of your biggest fans.”
“And so?” Clover’s voice rose, petulant.
Ira glanced at the board behind her, unable to look her in the eye. His gaze landed on a list of items for the silent auction: symphony tickets, a harbor cruise, eye surgery, architectural advice, a lava lamp, a Lalique decanter, a Derek Jeter dartboard.… He forced himself to focus.
“Clover, don’t you get to a point where you just want to make the very best of what you have? And you have so much. You do.”
Not surprisingly, her frown deepened. “What?”
“I know this place you’re in feels terrible. I can’t imagine being away from my kids so much—I mean, of course I don’t have kids, so I can’t really—”
“No. You don’t. You don’t, and you can’t. You’re right about that.”
Ira felt as if he could see her indignation rising like a vapor from her face.
“I don’t know you that well, Clover, but I do know you’re an attractive, talented woman with great kids who are doing fine even in the face of—”
“Of my having deserted them. Right?”
“No. Of their parents having decided to make separate lives but still respecting each other’s—”
“And how can you say they’re ‘doing fine’ when my son is apparently in danger of flunking out of school? That’s something you do know about—school performance. As related to home life.”
Ira folded his arms. “What do you want me to do? Tell me. I’m clueless.”
“Be a friend. Don’t call me on the carpet. I have a therapist to do that. I have life to do that.”
Ira stood and held his arms open to Clover. What else could he do? She stood and let him hold her. It felt insincere to him, the coward’s way out, but it was all he had to offer. He gazed miserably at the wall, over her fragrant hair.
… a tour of the WGBH studios in Boston, a set of Bose speakers, six sessions of equine massage (what?), a child’s bike, a silver tray …
When she stopped crying, she said quietly, “I wish you weren’t gay.”
“Sometimes I wish that, too,” said Ira, “though it’s mostly when I have to deal with the car mechanic.”
She laughed. Thank heaven.
The hardest by far was Sarah: partly because Ira’s attention had to stay on Rico, partly because her determination made it hard to tell how sick she really was, and partly because Ira couldn’t figure out what was going on with the two men in her life—and he didn’t dare ask.
Since Sarah had started her treatment, Ira had seen Gus a couple of times at dropoff and pickup, but then he came along with Sarah for the springtime parent-teacher conference. He was the kind of guy you’d describe as rugged or strapping, built for an outdoor life of chopping down trees and turning them into cabins. He had pink, oversunned skin, carroty hair, and a shrub of a beard. He dressed in new jeans (his “dressy” ones, Ira imagined) and wore dainty, old-fashioned spectacles that harked back to Henry Thoreau.
He spoke with scholarly precision, and though he seemed to have sprung from nowhere, like a genie from a bottle, he also seemed to know Rico as well as Sarah did. In fact, he spoke of Rico as if the boy were his son.
“We’re concerned,” he said, “that Rico might feel markedly different from the other boys and girls because of his mother’s cancer—even ashamed of that difference.” And when Ira asked Sarah how Rico was sleeping, Gus was the one who answered, “He’s become acutely reattached to his snake, Balboa. When he stays over at my place, he drags that creature into my bed at two or three in the morning. But I haven’t noticed nightmares, no terrors or accidents, no talk of death or dying.”
“Balboa’s stuffed,” Sarah said.
“Well, phew!” said Ira. Snakes, stuffed or not, were the least of Ira’s concerns about Rico. During the conference, Sarah spoke less than Gus did. Sometimes she just watched him talk about her son as if she were an impartial witness, a home-study consultant or a distant cousin.
That night, Sarah phoned him at home. Few parents took advantage of Ira’s accessibility; this was a first for Sarah.
“I owe you an apology,” she said. “You must have wondered what the hell was going on there. I didn’t know Gus would be coming along until this morning. He insisted.”
“Well, you might have noticed my double take.” He was grating cheese for Anthony’s asparagus risotto.
“I don’t know how to explain this,” she said.
Ira waited.
“Okay, Gus and I are married—but it’s so I can have his incredible health insurance. My treatment is going to be long and expensive. Gus has known Rico since he was tiny, and he really cares about him. They really care about each other. I mean, they’re genuine friends. We’re all … friends.”
He tapped the grater for the last flakes of cheese. “So Gus is like a godfather.”
She did not agree with this statement but said, “You must wonder about Percy, too.”
“I do, but it may be none of my business,” said Ira. What he thought was, Young lumberjack trumps elderly librarian; what’s there to wonder, honey?
“Anything that affects Rico is your business, right?”
“That’s Evelyn’s line, but it’s not so simple.” Ira handed the bowl of cheese to Anthony, who stood at the stove, stirring the rice.