They sat at the bar and talked about the people they once had in common. Frank asked him if he’d heard about Mike Kronish. It was policy at Troyer, Barr to make partners “of counsel” when they turned sixty-five — an emeritus-type designation that furnished them with an office and an income for perpetuity, but stripped them of responsibility and power. When they tried to make Kronish of counsel he declared a fight. He made it clear that he had no desire to be the defanged old man coolly sought out on occasion for some niblet of sage advice. He campaigned hard to have the bylaws changed. When the vote was rejected at the partner caucus, he threatened to sue for age discrimination, but he knew as well as anyone that the bylaws were the bylaws. Troyer, Barr was bigger than any one man. He resigned and started his own firm downtown. He was, Tim guessed, siphoning off clients and billing like a bull fresh out of law school.
Frank told Tim the details of Sam Wodica’s death. Unlike Kronish, Troyer, Barr’s former managing partner had been happy to retire. He moved to Malibu and devoted himself to surfing and flying. His antique biplane drifted off course and ran into trouble during a sudden ice storm over the desert. He radioed for help and then went silent. The wreckage was spotted a few weeks later between broken canyons, and his remains were confirmed by dental records.
“An ice storm over the desert?”
“That’s what I heard, Mr. Farnsworth.”
Mr. Farnsworth. He had not heard those words spoken in years. It was someone’s name, his name, but it was no one he knew. It had belonged, if it belonged to anyone, to a fiction, the name of someone who might never have walked the earth.
“There’s something I’ve always meant to ask you, Frank,” he said. “Do you have kids?”
Frank was tipping back his beer. He nodded with his brows. “Two boys,” he replied, resettling his bottle on the coaster.
“Do you have pictures?”
“Pictures?”
“With you. In your wallet.”
“They’re grown men now. Twenty-eight and thirty.”
“No families of their own?”
“One’s married. The other… I can’t say one way or the other about that one. To be honest, he’s always sort of confused me. Maybe he’s gay. I don’t know.”
He turned away and drank his beer. Tim did the same, and for a moment they looked like perfect strangers forced together by the confines of the bar. After a moment Tim removed his leather wallet, water-stained and contoured by age. He opened it to a portrait of Jack at just a few months, sitting on Becka’s lap. Next to them sat Becka’s boyfriend what’s-his-name, the producer. Jane stood behind them.
“That’s my family there,” he said.
Frank took the wallet offered him and admired the picture. Then he handed it back with a kind word. “Looks like a happy bunch,” he said. When they were through with their second beer they left the bar.
He walked with Frank to the subway terminal. They walked leisurely, avoiding the puddles. He spoke freely to Frank. He told him about his wife’s sickness and recovery, his daughter’s music career, and his walking. He admitted that a breakdown some years back now required him to take a cocktail of antipsychotic medication. He wasn’t confiding, for there was nothing to keep secret anymore, and no one to keep a secret from. Surprised by the candor, or simply attentive, Frank said very little.
When they reached the entrance he held out his hand, something he never liked to do because of his missing fingers. “Mr. Novovian,” he said.
Frank showed no reservations in taking his hand. The two men said good-bye, promising that if the chance arose in the future, they’d do this over again. Then Tim watched him as he disappeared into the terminal, heading toward the train that for all these years, night after night, had taken him from the city into New Jersey, toward home.
Months before his reappearance, Becka had mentioned that he was trying to return. She wanted to give her mother reason to live. But Jane didn’t want him to come and she didn’t want to live. She had made peace with dying. She had watched him struggle for too long to pretend that struggling was profitable. If it was her turn to go, she would go. She would go peacefully.
Then he returned and she wanted to live.
If he could suffer like that, if he could endure such an ordeal. If he could be so valiant.
The equipoise she had struck was ruptured the minute he walked into the room. Going peacefully, that was history. She began to rage as he had raged.
Did he think it was the clinical trial? The clinical trial wasn’t what saved her.
He didn’t believe that. With him it was just working or failing to work. Cells lived or they died. The heart beat or stopped beating. Then the entire thing returned to ashes and dust. He’d come a long way from the man who once believed that God was in the trenches surrounding every atom, fighting the devil for the soul.
“There’s no soul,” he said. “No God and no soul.”
“What about your mind, all the miracles of your mind?”
“It’s captive.”
“Captive to what?”
“The body. The body’s decay.”
“You don’t believe that,” she said. “I don’t believe you believe that.”
He did. The medicine had set him right at last.
She stood up and went over to the window. She looked out for a while before turning and sitting on the ledge. “When you recover from an illness,” she said, “as I have, no matter what you thought you believed, you start to think maybe there’s something.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he said. “I’ve never recovered.”
“Don’t be self-pitying.”
“I’m not self-pitying,” he said. “Just stating the facts.”
He had walked and walked to get back to her, and now that she was home, there was nothing more to do. Returning to her, returning to her, returning to her again and again, was not a possible life. It was twice the challenge as the going because he was working on low energy and no sleep. He could do it when it was a matter of life and death. But now, now he needed to let himself rest when it came time to rest, and to move on when it came time to move on, and to do so in the direction of the moving on.
“What about the vacation?” she said. “We planned a safari.”
He didn’t reply. The safari had always been pure delusion.
If he left now, she told him, he would be leaving her worse off than when he found her. She would not want to live, but she would not want to go peacefully, either. She would rage, and her raging would be pointless.
She became deeply afraid and began to cry. He made no move to comfort her. He had kept his backpack on, which made it hard to read his intentions. Did he mean to leave now, that night?
Not wanting to wake the baby, he thought twice about ringing the buzzer so early in the morning. He settled himself on the stoop. Becka’s boyfriend rescued him an hour later, coming home from a late-night recording session, and brought him up to their third-floor walk-up where the coffee was brewing and Bob Dylan was playing low on the radio. Becka’s boyfriend said, “Look who I found.” Becka turned and showed surprise. She poured him a cup of coffee, which he drank on a vintage barstool with a sparkling red vinyl seat. Her boyfriend finished his beer and excused himself to get some shut-eye. He kissed Becka on the forehead and left the room. There was a certain unorthodox domestic tranquillity here that made her father happy to have witnessed.
She placed Jack in his arms while she went to the bedroom to change out of her pajamas. When she returned she was wearing a pair of denim coveralls and a faded 7UP T-shirt. She asked him if he wanted breakfast.