The father shrugs.
"Were you ever a fuckup as a kid?"
Richard shakes his head. "I don't think so. I didn't drink, I didn't do drugs, when I was in my twenties I smoked pot. I thought it was really radical."
"You didn't have to clean my puke in the bathroom, I was going to do that. No one should have to clean up someone else's puke."
"It's not like it could wait, and, besides, I didn't want the dog to eat the vomit."
"That's nice, very dadlike."
"I enjoyed it," he says, telling the truth. "I felt very dadlike, very parental."
Ben pours himself another glass of juice. "You got laid," he says, speaking into the refrigerator.
"Yeah."
"I think I sort of knew that's what you were doing, and I freaked out; I figured once you got a girlfriend you'd dump me."
"I'm not going to dump you. Now go to work; call me later."
BEN LEAVES, and Richard is sick with exhaustion. Drained but agitated, he lies down, tries to follow his breathing, but can't. He sees Madeline, the swimmer, go by and wonders why he didn't think of it sooner. A swim. At water's edge, he remembers dipping his feet into a milky-blue antiseptic bath before entering the high-school pool; his skin was perpetually chapped from the extreme chlorine. He plunges in — the act of immersing, the sand sucking at his feet, the salt stinging his eyes, is delicious. He swims towards Santa Monica, crawling, turning his head to breathe, seeing only water and sometimes a flash of beach. The resistance of the water is a strange relief. It is as though he is high from the tumult of last night — the tsuris, his mother would call it. Ocean rolling, he swims, and when he runs out of breath he lies on his back, pacing himself. He is not alone — there are surfers and dolphins — and whatever discomfort he felt earlier is replaced with a buzz, a positive charge, a sense of having survived.
He swims until he can't move his arms anymore, until he has no kick left, until he cannot lift his head, and then he lets a wave carry him back to shore. He walks down the beach back to the house, showers, dresses. It's 10:30 a.m. — what the hell do people do all day?
HE CALL HIS BROTHER at work. "Not interrupting, am I?" It's one-thirty on the East Coast.
"Just answering e-mail. I get seventy or eighty a day, people who would never pick up the phone are perfectly happy to e-mail. How's Ben?"
"Really screwed up."
"He's seventeen."
"He's gay," Richard says.
There's a pause; clearly the brother already knew or suspected. "It's not considered deviant anymore."
"It's not what a father hopes for."
"It's not an illness. Every kid is different," his brother says. "Barth turned out great, but look at Penny, she's brewing some kind of eating disorder and she's a shoplifter; twice she's been picked up for stealing eye shadow. It drives Meredith crazy— can you imagine the daughter of a feminist stealing makeup?"
"Why does she steal makeup?"
"No idea, we've never even seen her with makeup on."
"Maybe she wears it in secret."
"And Meredith's father almost had to do jail time for tax evasion; we bailed him out."
"The lawyer?"
"About ten years ago, he just decided to stop paying his taxes — no real reason. When they caught up with him, we had to loan him money so he didn't go to jail, and he was disbarred, and he never repaid us — it was Merediths inheritance from her grandmother."
"I had no idea."
"It's not like we go around telling people. Families are filled with shit."
"What were we like — did we ever do anything bad?"
"You once told Dad he was mean, and I think he would have liked to have killed you — 'ungrateful son-of-a-bitch,' he called you."
"Did you know we had polio?"
"I knew you had something that made your leg sick and that you impressed the doctor, who thought you might never walk without the brace. Don't you remember, your shoes?"
"We always had good shoes."
"Well, there was a reason."
"Don't you think it's really weird that no one told us?"
"They felt lucky we survived and didn't want the stigma of it. I think she even changed doctors so it wasn't in our records."
"Can you do that?"
"She didn't want people to think badly of us."
"Why was it bad? It wasn't our fault, we got a virus."
"She associated it with poor hygiene — dirty Jews and so on."
"Do you remember your tantrums?" Richard asks. "You had incredible tantrums, and you'd break things, and Dad almost called the police on you, but Mom stopped him."
"He did?"
"Yeah, it scared him; he worried you were crazy. He'd say, 'Do you need to go to a hospital?' "
"I don't remember that."
A silence — maybe he shouldn't have mentioned the tantrums. "Meredith told me about the prize. I don't know what to say."
"Very disappointing; it was the one thing I wanted, and now it's not going to happen, so does that make me a loser?"
"I don't think so."
"Meredith says if one of the kids came to me crying about it I'd tell them how wonderful it was that they'd worked so hard, gotten so much recognition, and accomplished so much, and when it's a prize that only one person gets it's hard to be that person — not winning doesn't mean you lose."
"She's right."
"I know, but I still can't swallow it, and secretly I'm mad at myself for ever thinking I might win." He changes the subject. "Are you still seeing the woman from the produce section?"
"We're friends," Richard says.
WHEN HE'S DONE with the brother, he calls Cynthia. "Free for lunch?"
"Yeah, sure, I guess, is everything all right?"
"Twelve-thirty. I'll pick you up?"
He takes her to a health-food place near the housewife rehab. "What's spelt?" he asks.
"It's the new-old whole wheat."
"And what's gluten — why do some people want it and some don't?"
"It's not good in the gut," one of the customers says.
They sit at a small table in the corner; she sprinkles sesame seeds across her salad.
"How's the roommate?" Richard asks.
"Someone hijacked her computer — online — gave it a worm that ate everything, cored it out. In the morning there was just the shell, the box, blinking at her, couldn't read its own hard drive. It threw her over the edge. Apparently, that's how this whole thing started — identity theft. Her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend stole her identity, ran up huge bills, and it took two years to clear her name. Anyway, I had to take her back to the hospital; she started saying the worm was in her brain, attacking her brain."
"And the weatherman — are you still seeing the weatherman?"
"Off and on," she says. "He helped me get her to the hospital, but I have to end it. There's something about his hair — it's so well organized that when I run my hand through it, it doesn't budge. So — what's up with you?" Cynthia asks. "You called the lunch."
"Everything," he says. "Turns out Nic next door is some kind of culture god hiding out; the photographers across the street are there for him."
"You're like a freak magnet," she says. "First me, then the movie star, and now the ghost of J. D. Salinger."
"How do you know Salinger?"
"I'm a housewife; I'm not illiterate."
"Anyway, Ben spotted Bob Dylan at Nic's, and now I feel like I can't talk to the guy; I don't know if I'm intimidated or pissed at him for not saying anything." She nods. "And then Ben… Well — he's gay." Richard takes a breath. "It gives me the creeps, the idea of him with other men — when he sees me naked, does he find that interesting?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"You're his father."
"Who knows what gay people think?"
"Just because someone is gay doesn't mean that they're attracted to every person of the same sex."