Page 107 of Playworld
“Are you mad at me about her dying?”
“No, baby, it wasn’t your fault.” She took my wrist across the table. “None of it. Do you understand?”
Because I had teared up, I fanned my mouth. “Wasabi,” I said, and then made a great show of drinking my water, which Mom watched intently.
“Griffin, what do you remember about the fire?”
The waitress came and refilled my glass.
“Not much,” I said. “I remember going into the closet with Oren. With the candle. And then I set the jacket on fire. And then I heard Minou crying. And then me and Oren—”
“Oren and I,” she said.
“Oren and I were in our room, hiding. We were like,‘It’s a real fire.’And then we ran to tell you and Dad. And then we all escaped. To the lobby.”
Mom’s smile was mournful. She still held my wrist. “No, baby, that’s not how it happened. Your father and I were in our bedroom. We smelled smoke. Dad found you, hiding in your room.”
“Where was Oren?”
Mom said, “Did you and Elliott never talk about this?”
I shook my head.
“That sweet little boy,” Mom said. “He was in the living room, looking for the cat. He kept saying her name. ‘Minou? Minou?’ He was who you must’ve heard.”
I was rocked by this. “And…then what?”
“And then we filled the bathtub and left both of you in there while we tried to put out the fire. I ran pots of water from the kitchen to the closet to try to douse the flames. Your father went to get the floor’s extinguisher, but it didn’t work. So then we grabbed you and fled.” Mom squeezed my wrist before letting go. “You were just a child,” she said. “If the fault was anyone’s, it was mine for leaving out the candles.”
I was trying to make so many contrary thoughts in my mind jibe, I had so many images swirling in my head, that it wasn’t until the diners in the private tatami room behind us shouted, “Kanpai!” that Mom came back into focus.
She raised her glass and drank. “Where were we?” she asked.
I was glad to change the subject too. “Your favorite thing,” I said, “you ever did. With Dad. You said it was that trip across the country.”
Mom shrugged, brightening. “You know how your father is. He can get distracted sometimes. But he isn’t distracted when he drives. Or maybe it’s that the driving distracts him and he can concentrate on other things better. We drove and talked and kept an eye on the cat, and it was just the two of us for seven days. But it seemed like a month. In the best way. Your dad’s left arm got so sunburned because he had the window down, and he had to wear a long-sleeved shirt by the time we got to Texas. And when we arrived in New York, his parents told us to keep the money from the car, and we moved into an apartment in Jackson Heights. We didn’t have a pot to piss in, but we were so happy. Your dad started getting steady work. I got the job at Carnegie Hall. And then we could afford to move to Manhattan, to Lincoln Towers. Two years later, I had you. And two years after that, Oren.”
I imagine Mom and Dad now, driving across the country together. First through hot and desolate desert scenes, movie landscapes: buttes in the distance and tumbleweeds rolling across the highway and Mom having all of Dad’s attention. The kitten atop the bed with them, happy in the air-conditioned hotel room where they’d stopped for the night. The pair waking before sunrise and jumping into the car, to get an earlystart and beat the heat. Cities I have still never visited appearing on the horizon as they headed east: Albuquerque, Amarillo, Oklahoma City. Mom faced forward, her husband at her side, her back to the future, the children she did not yet know she’d have, the kitten purring in her lap…
And finally New York. That island whose skyline was just coming into view from the Jersey side. When the Empire State Building still reigned as the city’s tallest, but seen from this far away not even measuring an inch. It was a vista I knew well. In the foreground first was the Hackensack River and then Newark Bay before they entered the Holland Tunnel. Or did they bear north and take the George Washington Bridge, Mom unaware, as they ran parallel to the Upper West Side, that they were passing the building where they’d make their lives?—she certain she could rely on the warmth she now felt in her guts. Now and forever.
Forever being a concept with which I parted that day. In the silence between finishing our meal and paying the bill—Mom calculating the tip with great care—I tried as hard as I could to recall Oren and me in that bathtub and what must’ve been a comparatively calm, incongruous pause in that conflagration. But perhaps it wasn’t calm at all. Perhaps it was the most terrifying part. Oren and I, facing each other as the water overflowed, while smoke crawled up from the doorjamb, billowed along the ceiling, and sank toward us. What did it mean, I wondered—I still do—to not remember something so fundamental about yourself? Was it the same as if it never happened? Or was it still happening? Like the fire still smoldering beneath the forest floor.
—
Dad came home from Delaware right before the July Fourth weekend. The first leg of the tour forSam and Sarahad concluded, and we had the holiday together before he’d leave again for Philadelphia. Oren and I hadn’t seen him in nearly a month. He blew into the apartment, short-tempered. Mom had already packed us for our annual trip out to Montauk, but Dad’s suitcase lay open and empty on their bed, which annoyed him more. He was in a bad mood the entire weekend. He didn’t want to swim and was distant at our dinners. He didn’t want to fish with us or play miniature golf. In the afternoons, Oren and I often returned to the motel room from the beach, where they’d left us, to hear them arguing in the room. On Monday, Dad said he had to get to Philadelphia early. Webegan our push back toward the city that afternoon but stopped, as we always did, at Elliott and Lynn’s house in Amagansett. Their place was in that dune-swept stretch of barrens—a solid ten miles of moonscape—between Montauk and East Hampton. Their house was supermodern, a two-story rectangle fashioned of white poplar sheared down its center by a glass-filled triangle. These visits regularly followed the same schedule: Elliott made a huge batch of banana daiquiris in the blender. The moment they were served Al, who had a house in Montauk, appeared, as if passing through (“I figure,” he said, “I leave by four, I beat traffic”) but stuck around until later. When Mom asked where his boyfriend, Tony, was, Al frowned and said, “As if I fucking know.” Dinner was salmon and chicken and green beans with almonds and potato salad; after having seconds and white wine spritzers, Dad and Elliott fell asleep at the dinner table, Al and Mom talked on the back deck while he smoked and wept, Lynn did the dishes, Oren and I went to the guest room to watch Mutual of Omaha’sWild Kingdom.When Dad, awake come evening, darkened our door, his bad mood had returned—he said it was time to go, and then there was the long drive home. Mom’s and Dad’s faces were illuminated by the dash. It was remarkable how they could conduct an entire conversation I somehow couldn’t follow about a couple whom I’d never heard of, never met.
“He thinks,” Dad said, “she’s being a little too suspicious.”
“She thinks,” Mom said, “she has reason to be.”
“He needs,” Dad said, “for her to trust him.”
Here the conversation ended, though she allowed him to stroke her hair for the rest of the drive. Traffic was a ruby-red serpent’s tail from Queens to Manhattan. On Tuesday morning, Dad left to go back on tour, but I had to be at NBC studios even earlier—call was at six a.m. My lines were barely memorized. I still had not cracked a single summer reading book. My backpack was full of graph paper for maps and dice and all theD&Dhandbooks. I had decided to design my own campaign for Oren, Tanner, and Cliffnotes, which I vowed to have ready to play by the fall. Taping for the fifth season ofThe Nuclear Familyhad officially commenced—which was another way of saying that for the most part, and once again, my summer was effectively over.
As if that weren’t bad enough, I hadn’t spoken to Amanda. Pride,along with the adherence to Dad’s steam-room pep talk, forbade I call her. I had reconciled myself to the forlorn offseason he had recommended, and I had done my best to fill the intervening days with work: early morning weightlifting sessions with Vince before heading to 8H; world-buildingD&Dcampaign sessions—I had named my campaign’s settingGriffynweld—during breaks from shooting and in the evenings when I got home. But still adrift, I did not know how to address Dad’s counsel, since I did not know there was technique to study and I wasn’t going to go to Times Square to buy porn. The amount of magical thinking that by this point surrounded her had become so intense it bordered on a kind of madness. Alone in my dressing room, with my Dungeon Master’s dice, I often made predictions aloud—“If I roll a natural twenty, Amanda will fall in love with me”—a prognostication that, after several rerolls, rarely came true. But I persevered in my magical thinking. Riding my bike to 30 Rock in the early mornings, I might forecastto the secondwhen the streetlights changed from red to green, tethering the timing to the certainty of our union. If, riding home that evening, the digital clock atop the MONY building read 5:55, I made a love wish; and if, before it flashed, I correctly guessed the temperature that followed, that too meant Amanda would someday be mine. I’d glare at the dressing room’s phone on my vanity mirror’s table—I’d never received a single call on it—and will it to ring, promising aloud, “Someday it will be Amanda on the line, asking me to go out with her.”
One afternoon in late July, it rang.