“Listen, Dad,” said Nathan when he picked up the phone, throwing himself across his father’s abandoned side of the bed, “I’ve been thinking. And really. You could come home any time you want to.”
“I know that,” said Dr. Shapiro.
“You were a good father, Dad,” said Nathan, clutching tight the torn little ball of yellow paper. “You were the best father in the world.”
“Thanks,” said Dr. Shapiro, but he said it abstractedly, a little too fast, as though it were only a reply, as though his mind were on other more difficult, more wondrous things.
Admirals
NATHAN JAMMED HIS SNEAKERS against the back of his father’s seat and listened, eager and miserable, to the opening notes of the song on the car radio. He had no idea. His father had been quizzing him for as long as he could remember, and as a result Nathan knew the presidents of the United States (in order), the capitals of all fifty states, the provinces of Canada and the nations of Europe and their capitals (including Vaduz), the great inventions and their inventors, the major rivers of the world in order of length, famous black and Jewish Americans and their achievements, gods and heroes of ancient Greece, planets and moons of the solar system, as well as two dozen common phobias, including pantophobia, the fear of everything.
Unfortunately, the topic of the day was rock-and-roll music, and the quiz was for the benefit of Anne, Dr. Shapiro’s girlfriend, the play lady from the children’s hospital where Nathan’s father was the psychiatrist. They were on their way to Annapolis (the capital of Maryland), to stay in a motel, even though Annapolis was only half an hour from Ellicott City, where Nathan, his brother, and their mother lived. It had been raining lightly all morning, the air was chilly for May, and Nathan felt a kind of dread of this false vacation. Dr. Shapiro turned up the volume on the radio and glanced over his shoulder at Nathan, then looked at Anne to make sure that she was paying attention.
“O.K.,” said Dr. Shapiro, slowly rolling one hand in the air, as though guiding Nathan into a tight parking space. “Who is this?”
“David Bowie,” said Ricky, Nathan’s little brother. He arched forward to pat Anne on the top of her head, which was just visible to the boys in the backseat. Ricky — seven, affectionate, ill-tempered, and wild — had seen David Bowie once on television, dressed like a Navajo from Jupiter, and had been greatly impressed.
“Quiet, Ricky,” said Dr. Shapiro. “Nathan?”
Since his parents’ divorce, a year and a half ago, Nathan had become interested in rock-and-roll, but aside from songs by the Beatles, which he knew fairly well, and a few by the Rolling Stones, he wasn’t much good at this topic. For a moment, running the names of random bands and singers through his mind, Nathan panicked, and his knees began to ache from the pressure he was exerting against his father’s seat, until it occurred to him that this was a new kind of quiz. This time his father didn’t know the correct answer any more than he did. He could give any name at all.
“Eric Clapton,” said Nathan in an offhand way, watching the back of his father’s head, then, in a burst of fresh alarm, looking to see if Anne was going to call his bluff. She was younger than his father, and he remembered with a start her having told him that the Buffalo Springfield had played at her homecoming in college.
“Eric Clapton?” said his father. “O.K.! That’s amazing, isn’t it, Anne?” She smiled. “Couldn’t have been more than a dozen bars before he got it.”
“That’s great,” said Anne, turning to smile at Nathan. Anne was very nice, Nathan reminded himself, and then felt guilty because he had to remind himself. He’d always liked Anne — had loved her, in fact, when she was just the play lady at his father’s work. He and Ricky had spent entire days down in her playroom, gluing together Popsicle sticks and weaving multicolored pot holders that they brought home to their mother, and Anne would buy them Chinese lunches and comic books. But ever since she was his father’s girlfriend, Nathan had come to suspect all of her former friendliness. He shunned her hugs and sat apart from her.
“It’s David Bowie,” said Ricky. “Ask me, Dad. Ask me.”
“David Bowie,” said Dr. Shapiro. “Get out of here.”
They passed a sign for Annapolis.
“Chuck lives in Annapolis,” said Ricky. “Mom says.”
“Who’s Chuck?” said their father.
Without knowing exactly why, Nathan hit Ricky on the arm, hard — much harder than he had intended to, really — and Ricky began to cry, then stopped and looked at Nathan, his forehead wrinkled and red.
“Um — a doo-doo head,” said Ricky, valiantly turning silly. “Chuck, buck, duck, muck, luck.”
Then the song was over, and Nathan’s heart sank as he realized that the disk jockey in just a moment would identify the singer, and as Ricky arrived, with a gasp, at the end of his incantation. “Fuck,” he whispered behind his hand. He stared blankly at Nathan for an instant, then smiled in horror and delight, his eyes still full of tears. “We’re there,” said Anne, and switched off the radio.
Nathan’s mother had had four boyfriends since the divorce, and, until Chuck, Nathan had liked them all. The first three boyfriends — all of them — wore beards and glasses, like Nathan’s father, and drove calm, square foreign cars. They’d tried very hard to make friends with Nathan, and so he had tried, too; there were ballgames and bats’ jaws and discussions of science. Each time, Nathan felt sad when the boyfriend stopped calling and didn’t come to dinner anymore, though not as sad as his mother. Of the many new spectacles the divorce had created — his mother, in a suit, happily leaving for work in the morning, Nathan fixing their dinner with the radio blaring — the most disturbing was that of their mother crying, which she hadn’t done even at the death of their grandfather but which now they had seen ten times at least.
And now Chuck, a small-plane pilot, was pushing their mother to even greater extremes of emotion. He had an Italian car, with only two seats. On Friday nights when Chuck broke dates, their mother sank into jealous despair, and spent the evening devouring an entire novel or talked on the phone to her friends for hours. She would indulge the boys with popcorn and board games and gin rummy, half-sadly smiling throughout. Very late one evening the past winter, she’d come downstairs in her boots, drawn on her coat, and gone out, returning in tears an hour later. The next morning Nathan found her sitting on the stairs, in her big bathrobe, the rolled Sunday paper lying in her lap. He reached down and took the paper from her and opened it, laughing, as if she were only absent-minded.
“Mom,” he said. “Where did you go last night?”
She told him, crying; the story came out in little bursts as she held her breath between each sob. And over a breakfast at which Nathan drank coffee, and they heard Ricky’s cartoons come on upstairs, as she confided to him other, less desperate tales of checking up on Chuck, he had felt himself, almost physically, growing older.