Against my better judgment, I once brought Steven home for the weekend. He had demanded it, wanted to get to know my parents.
Before dinner, I smoked a joint in the basement while he, ignoring my amorous inclinations, perused everything stored there. Earlier he had complimented Betty on her antiques, on her upholstery, on the chairs in our living room that, thank God, said nothing to anyone.
From anyone else, she would have liked the attention.
Him she just ignored.
At the supper table, Steven and my father talked beard maintenance. Daddy had recently grown a beard, which Betty hated, a fact that pleased him. During this chat, Betty banged pots and pans like a drunk in a truck-stop kitchen. “Steven made this bread,” she said as she plunked a platter of it—not sliced but yanked apart—on the table. I worried that she had connected the dots about Steven and me. How could she have missed it? But they seemed to know and not know, accept and reject. I tried to find some tiny place between honesty and comfort where I could just be peaceful.
“It’s sour dough,” my mother said of the bread, breaking, as I recall, the word into two, like always.
“It’s one damn word,” I mouthed to her silently, but she was off and running.
“You know, Steven,” she said, “I never eat bread and neither should my husband. I have to watch what he eats. He has a heart problem. It is extremely serious”
“It’s just undiagnosed,” I explained to Steven. Whatever her apparent diffidence, my mother had long been the protector of my father’s vulnerable heart.
That registered.
“Later,” my mother mouthed silently across the table. We have always had our best chats like this.
My father grabbed hunks of the bread, one after another. He wouldn’t stop eating the bread. As my mother stared, he stared right back, savoring every bite.
After dinner, we adjourned to the guest room where Steven was to sleep on one of my mother’s most uncomfortable antiques—a creaky bed with a wafer-thin mattress dating back to the Civil War. I was embarrassed. Late that night, my father, in his underwear and demonstrating my family’s continuing tendency to appear out of nowhere at the worst possible moments, caught us making out on the couch in the family room. Adopting our usual stance toward anything out of the ordinary, he had said nothing as I waited, anticipating the cardiac event that Betty had predicted.
At breakfast the next morning, after he saw Steven and me together, Daddy was quiet, not especially upset or especially friendly.
He was just blank, as if a lightning strike had left him . . . absent.
. . .
A few months later, all four of us were together again, on the afternoon of our graduation, drinking champagne at the apartment Steven and I shared. Before we left for commencement, my father kept getting up to look around the apartment. He lingered in both bedrooms, the one crammed with stuff with its double bed and the other with the tiny, narrow bed where, I hoped they believed, Steven slept.
My mother was calm that day, almost sentimental as she brushed crumbs off the shoulders of my suit and looked at me as if she could not fathom the speed at which I was traveling away. She smiled at me tentatively, as if expecting some sort of rejection, as if she were about to discover that I had somehow moved beyond her. She always believed that people who lived in other places or traveled more were bound to reflect her. That fall I would go to Boston, to graduate school. When I had told my mother about this, she was quiet, just shook her head. “Well then,” she said. “Good. You need to get out of here. I can send you a check now and then.”
That afternoon, after commencement, my father just could not stay in his chair. He seemed interested in every detail in our place, determined to uncover any clue he could find to the life of his son. When I walked into the bathroom, Big George was there, spraying a bit of Steven’s Royal Copenhagen cologne on his fingers. Rubbing them together, as if he were wary of actually taking a sniff, he caught a glance of me behind him in the mirror over the sink. My face reddened as our eyes met in the mirror that Steven always kept so clean.