Page 139 of Playworld
Fuck you,I wanted to respond. This flippancy—this smugness—with which certain therapists alluded to a person’s blind side always drove me to distraction, because it revealed their assumption that they were no longer mysteries to themselves. Elliott, I reflected, wasn’t guilty of this hubris. “Never mistake your own perceptiveness for self-awareness,” he’d once told me, in those fervent couple of years I saw him again when I returned from school, “because one is an entirely different mode of knowledge than the other.”
“Got kids?” I asked Brian instead, knowing it would further frustrate Naomi to change the subject.
“Two of them,” he offered, and then turned to face the road.
Generally speaking, when parents hesitate to elaborate on their children, they’re doing it out of either mock humility or shame. The middle ground—merely employed—is the most reliable way to end such a conversation.
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Right now, you mean?”
“In school, out of school? Kuwait?”
Naomi laughed at my remark, snorting. “Those two?” she said. “Military? Please.”
I have always judged the long-term health of any relationship by the speed with which one member will publicly throw the other under a bus. Brian glanced at her; his smile, which had, up until that point, light in it, hardened.
“My daughter,” he said, “the older one, is in medical school. In New Haven.”
“At Yale?” I asked, as if there were another institution of higher learning there.
“She is, yes.”
“And your son?”
“Oy,” said Naomi, and shot me a look.
Brian’s head twitched at her comment. “He’s at home,” he said, “riding out the Bush economy.” He offered me his profile again and smiled, as if his son’s rudderlessness were a brilliant strategy for dealing with the recession.
“Smart kid,” I said. Actually, my inflection rose just enough to make it a question.
“He is,” agreed Brian, nodding now, repeating, “He is,” perhaps to convince himself, a therapist who had, in spite of all his training, somehow maybe screwed up his child. “He’s had a tough transition out of college.”
“It’s often the case,” I said sagely.
But my heart wasn’t in this. I thought back to that January night last year, sitting before the television in my first apartment, watching Baghdad get bombed in Desert Storm’s opening sorties, the white flares rendered phosphorescent by CNN’s night-vision lenses and then sinking like jellyfish into the green-tinted sky, the latter booming with antiaircraft fire.There they are,I thought,those thousand points of light!Bush’s approval ratings were up, along with inflation and unemployment. In one of my last sessions with Elliott before he got sick, I’d told him about a dream I’d had: I was bouncing through the desert in the back of a jeep, one of those old-school army models with its windshield folded atop the hood, the car driven by our commander in chief while the vice president rode shotgun. Both had forgone helmets, their shirts open at the collars. They seemed completely confident, as we ascended and descended the dunes, of our direction. Was this, I’d asked Elliott, the collective unconscious bubbling up? “Jung me no Jungs,” he said—dream interpretation and its questionable symbology bored him—but he stayed on the subject of politics. He was grim at the escalation of tensions in the Middle East, had predicted both a reinstitution of the draft and stiff resistance. “This could be it,” Elliott said. “This could be the Big One.” And while he sat, preoccupied, I took stock of the weight he’d lost, his sallow color, but because of my relative youth, his sublimation was still lost on me.
“I thought the eulogies were beautiful,” Naomi said. We’d merged onto the Grand Central Parkway, heading toward Jamaica Estates. “Especially Deborah’s. That story she told about him and Lynn falling in love.” She pressed her fingers to her chest and then looked at Brian over her glasses’ bridge. “I mean, if there was a dry eye in the place, I didn’t see it.” At the mention of this, she began to tear up herself. “I’m sorry,” she said to the both of us, wiping her eyes. I thought about the last timeI’d seen her cry, on the stairway in her house. She had been talking about love then as well.
Brian placed his hand over hers and squeezed it. “They were beautiful,” he said. “You know what it made me wish?”
Naomi didn’t ask for his answer.
“That we’d been together all our lives,” he said. “That I’d known you when I was a boy.”
At this I stared at Naomi’s reflection, mercilessly, deliberately, while she kept her eyes on the white dashes the car swallowed on the road.
“So tell us your news,” Naomi said, after clearing her throat. Her choice of pronoun was loaded. “I heard a rumor you’ve decided to become a writer. You gonna talk about your child acting career? All the famous people you worked with?” She looked at me in the rearview mirror once more, and when she spoke next it was finally clear that this was what she’d wanted to talk about all along. “Gonna spill all your secrets?”
Ihaddecided to become a writer, whatever that meant, although that wasn’t what I was dying to report to her.
“I’m getting married,” I said. If Brian hadn’t immediately turned to face me, he’d have noticed how utterly wounded Naomi was by this, her head shaking ever so slightly and her expression appearing squeezed, like fruit wrung of its final drops. I thought Brian was going to say “Mazel tov.”
Instead, he said, “An actor? Anything I’d have seen you in?”
—
On a late September afternoon, I rode my bike crosstown to meet Amanda.