Page 111 of Playworld

In response to which Mom smiled drily and then turned to Dad as if to ask,Are we done here?But instead of taking the cue, he said to Katie, “And these are my sons,” to which Oren, in a Hail Mary attempt to spring us, asked, “Can we get a cheesesteak?”

“I think everything’s closed,” Dad said, and laughed.

“Jim’s South St.’s open till midnight,” Oren said.

To which Dad, clearly pissed, smiled and said to Katie, “Good to see you,” as if she were filling in as tonight’s lead and then leaving the country.

Mom walked ahead of us as we departed the theater. She got in the cab first, after Dad hailed it. She said nothing after Oren asked again about the food and Dad, seated by the other door, barked at him, “Don’t even start!” Oren and I sat mute. When we arrived at the hotel, Mom announced, “I’m going to the bar.” And when Dad said, “I’ll join you,” she replied, “You’ll put the kids to bed.” Her presence was magically and invisibly in the room while the three of us changed into our pajamas and took turns brushing our teeth, its specter commanding us to not uttera word to each other while we lay in our beds. When she returned to our darkened room an hour later—I pretended to be asleep—I saw her enter the bathroom dressed, her reflection framed in the hall’s mirror, and then emerge in her nightgown before snapping off the light. I could feel her somehow nearer to Oren and me in our bed than she was to our father in the one adjacent.

Dad said, “Can we not do this please?”

For a long time, the only sound in the room was the air conditioner.

“Lily?”

When she still did not respond, Dad said to her, as if none of this night had happened, “What do you think of the changes?” she replied, “It doesn’t seem to me like anything’s changed.”

—

We had a miserable breakfast the following morning. Oren and I engaged in a sort of arms race, seeing who could pile his plate with the hotel’s most luxurious food; and while I declared myself the winner based on sheer mass (scrambled eggs and sausage links, a Belgian waffle with whipped cream, a bagel with lox, and a chocolate croissant), Oren’s creativity shamed me, building as he did a skyscraper of pancakes with strips of bacon interspersed between flapjack floors.

“Can I have a bite?” I asked.

“You can make your own,” Oren said.

“You both better eat all of that,” Dad said.

“It’s not like it’s à la carte,” Oren said.

“There are children starving in China,” Dad said.

“There are children starving here,” Mom said. She glared at him with a rare unvarnished and appalled disdain, while Dad gave the hotel fountain that splashed behind us a thousand-yard stare. Dad slugged his black coffee and disappointedly shook his head. From where I sat, I could see, through the hotel’s entrance, Broad Street shining as bright as a nuclear flash. There were other cast members eating at the tables nearby, and usually we could rely on Dad to at least fake the pleasure of our company. But when the occasional colleague would wave hello or say hi in passing, Dad ignored them, as if too pained by our presence to even bother with niceties.

“There’s an earlier train,” Mom announced.

Dad did one of his slow-mo nods, feigning an expression of thoughtfulness to hide his relief. “You’ll miss the matinee,” he stated.

“Both boys have to work tomorrow,” Mom said, giving him an out, but adding, “I know how important it is to you that they earn their keep.”

“Suit yourself,” Dad said. Then he got up from the table and left the restaurant, a departure to which Mom did not react and which seemed to turn up the volume of the cutlery striking the plates, of the fountain jets detonating in the pool.

We did not say goodbye to Dad before we left.

That night, back in New York, through our walls, Oren and I listened to Mom and Dad fighting over the phone. Oren whispered, “I know what this is about.”

Had he also recognized the woman in the cast?

“Last summer,” Oren continued, “I picked up the phone right when Dad answered, and this lady on the line was crying and said, ‘I don’t want this furniture, I just want your love.’ ”

Sometimes, Mom would speak while she sobbed. Between this and the way the walls muted what she said, all her words were buffed of contour, edgeless as sea glass.

“Do you think she found out he bought that stuff?” Oren asked.

We listened to their fighting some more, their argument punctuated by gasps so terrible I thought they might suck all the air out of the apartment.

“Do you think they’re going to get a divorce?” he said.

“No,” I said, speaking from a place of conviction I did not understand. “They love each other too much.”