At home, with their mother, Ricky did little harm to fixtures or vases, but his mood was black, and he kicked and shrieked; with their father he was festive and wily, and full of comments, but he couldn’t be trusted near anything valuable, and sometimes the sturdiest appliances came to pieces under his hand. Their mother’s nerves were shattered, like their father’s pipes and tumblers. When Ricky was not around, he was discussed in a manner that made Nathan uneasy, because the assumption seemed to be that Ricky had some kind of problem, or would soon be a problem — which, when Nathan thought about it for a minute, almost certainly meant that he, too, was a problem, only older.
“Nate! Nate!” said Ricky, from somewhere at the front of the toy store. Nathan looked one last time at the toy horse and crusader, reared up on their swath of metal turf — the only thing in the store that he even faintly coveted — then went to find his brother. Ricky stood on tiptoe, clutching the top of the low wood partition that protected the display of untouchable toys in the front window; he was looking past all the duckies and dancers to something in the street outside.
First Nathan saw the fabulous car, It was like a color-plate in the cumbersome book he’d been given for his eleventh birthday, The History of the Motor Car—a Cord, or a Duesenberg, or a Daimler, or one of those other extinct breeds of car that looked like small, wheeled mansions, with curtains, doorknobs, tiny lamps, the running boards like long verandas. And, as in the illustrations Nathan had gazed at, on the toilet or under the covers of his bed for hours at a time, there was something airless and artificial about the car — something as dead and impossible as the reconstructed skeletons of Allosaurus and Triceratops in a museum. There was a story, famous in their family — even Anne knew it — about Nathan at age four asking his parents which had come first, the dinosaurs or the old-fashioned cars. It still sometimes seemed to him that the things that had happened before he was born — Pearl Harbor, hieroglyphics, catapults, the day his parents fell in love — were equally ancient and interesting, cryptic and gone.
“It’s a millionaire,” said Ricky.
“It’s a playboy,” said Nathan.
The man stood in the light rain with one foot on the running board of his car, staring off toward the distant bay. He wore a blue blazer with a coat of arms on the breast pocket, white trousers, no socks, blue sailor’s sneakers. In one hand he casually held a briar, and in the other a gold lighter. He neither slouched nor stood erect, and Nathan immediately adjusted his own posture to match the playboy’s, but it was the man’s short silver hair that Nathan admired most, and the perfect wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and his slight smile.
“See that silver hair?” said Nathan. “When I’m old I want to have hair like that.”
“It’s gray,” said Ricky. “Can that car go a hundred miles an hour?”
“Any car can go a hundred miles an hour,” said Nathan the older brother. “You’re just supposed to look at that car. It doesn’t go anywhere.”
Their father appeared on the sidewalk in front of the toy store, and he and the playboy said hello.
“Dad’s talking to him,” said Ricky.
“You’re allowed to talk to guys like that when they stand there with their cars,” said Nathan. “They like it.”
Dr. Shapiro walked over to the man with silver hair and gestured at his car. The man nodded politely but didn’t smile. Beside him their father looked small, wet, bald, and faintly sloppy, and the fluttery hand he held out toward the vaulting fender of the car seemed to try — and fail — to grasp, to clutch. The playboy said something and then looked away again. Nathan saw in that instant that his father was a man whom a playboy would shun. Then a woman carrying shopping bags came toward the men — a television blonde, wearing an ash-gray trenchcoat and lots of makeup; she was very tall, with beautiful teeth. She twirled her umbrella over her head and it shot drops around her like a firework of water.
“An actress,” said Ricky, pinching Nathan’s arm.
The playboy nodded again to Dr. Shapiro, then went around to open the door for the actress, who gave the playboy a look that Nathan recognized. He had seen his mother give this look to Chuck, and she had no doubt once given it to his father — this look which, now that he recognized it, seemed to convey everything that, Nathan imagined, constituted sexual desire, a look of soft, distrustful frankness, wide- and wet-eyed. And then they got in and drove away, the car sweeping out of the parking space and into the street without a sound, without a squeal, like a sailboat.
“You lied,” said Ricky. “It does go.”
“Look at Dad,” said Nathan.
Dr. Shapiro stood watching the fabulous car disappear for a moment, wiping the rain from his glasses, his head slightly turned away, as though he were listening to the couple’s dwindling laughter.
“He’s only a psychiatrist,” said Ricky.
“Here he comes,” said Nathan. He grabbed Ricky and pulled him into the board-game aisle. When their father came in, he was soaking wet, and he bought his sons several bright things that they had not asked for.
That night in the motel room, as he lay beside his brother, Nathan listened to the people sleeping around him; Ricky snored delicately. Nathan could hear the hum of the ice machine in the corridor, could hear his father’s wristwatch ticking on the night table, and the general, half-imaginary murmur that all motels emit at night. Anne had drawn the curtains; the room was so completely black that Nathan began to see bright colors, luminous Persian rugs. Lately he suffered from night anxieties, and although he would think and think about everything in his life that might be upsetting him — library fines, his recent failure to pass the parallel-bars exam, his fear of high school — he couldn’t determine what it was that kept him awake, with a stomach ache, night after night. It was as though he were trying to remember the answer to one of his father’s questions. He rolled onto his back, the motel sheets crackled, and, after a while, he began to drift, and the colors faded from his eyes. Ricky coughed in his sleep once, angrily. Then, in the instant before Nathan went under, a picture came into his mind. He lay like Moses in a little basket, floating among the bulrushes, and his parents stood on the bank above him, their arms around each other’s waists, looking down. They were singing to him. “We love you,” they sang.
The Halloween Party
WHENEVER NATHAN SHAPIRO REGARDED Eleanor Parnell, it was like looking at a transparent overlay in the World Book Encyclopedia. In his mind he would flip back and forth from today’s deep-voiced, black-haired, chain-smoking, heavy-breasted woman in a red sheath dress or tight dungarees, gracefully working the cork from another bottle of pink California wine, to the vague, large, friendly woman in plaids who had fed him year after year on Cokes and deviled-ham sandwiches, whose leaves he had raked for seven autumns now, and who still lay somewhere underneath the new Eleanor, like the skeleton of a frog beneath the bright chaos of its circulatory system.
It was only since Nathan had turned fourteen and found himself privy to the reckless conversation of divorcées — of those half-dozen funny, sad women with whom his mother had surrounded herself — that he had discovered Eleanor Parnell to be a woman of bad habits and of enterprises that ended in disaster. They said that she baked and consumed marijuana desserts, and that she liked to spend Christmas Eye playing blackjack in Las Vegas, alone. She drove her scarlet Alfa Romeo with the abandon of someone who, as Mrs. Shapiro pointed out, had always been very unlucky.