His mother brought home the clay sculpture. It was about two feet tall and looked very little like him, and the doors resembled flying walls. One day when he was home alone and she wasn’t back yet, having enrolled in another course, this one called How to Make Glass, he threw some baseballs at the sculpture but the clay held strong. The boy was twelve now. His hands were growing, but his fingers still fit the same locks. Somehow they stayed the size they needed to be, while the rest of the hand-palm, knuckles, wrist-grew with him.
The sixth and seventh keys fit doors in France. His mother and he went to Paris to visit his father who was on leave from the mysterious war and together the three of them had lunch at a café surrounded by iron lamp poles and they ate crusty bread and soft cheese with red ripe tomatoes. His father looked older and stronger than ever, with big arms and a ruddy tan, and the boy stood next to him and wanted to push all his keys at once into the man’s palm, to click and turn his father open, to make him tell what was happening. Secrets. His father and mother shared a room in the hotel and the boy had the room next door, with its strange-smelling comforter and a weird phone that had numbers in different configurations. He learned how to say Ou est la porte? which means Where is the door? and the porter at the hotel, after ignoring the question for the first five times, finally showed him a door, standing alone, on the lobby level, hoping to shut the boy up. Using the middle finger on his left hand, the boy opened to reveal just a closet, empty, with a few clothes hanging up and several swinging hangers. The porter babbled in amazement, Mais qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?! and took one of the hanging shirts straight away to the maitre d’ at the restaurant who had been bemoaning the loss of it for more than a year and the boy said, to no one, I suppose I’m just going to sit here, and he went inside the closet and curled up on the floor. The porter, when he returned, brought the boy a glass of wine and a piece of apple. When his mother found him, asleep on the floor of the closet, she hugged him for a long time, and he showed her how his hand was international.
At the Louvre, the boy felt the pointer finger on his left hand itch after greeting Mona Lisa under glass. He found the docent room the way a hound finds blood, and played gin rummy with a pooped guide whose earrings were little diamond stars. His father was off doing military business that day. When they returned to the hotel, the mother angry at the boy because he’d vanished, they found the father weary on the bed, looking worried, his ruddy tan fading like a bright couch left too long in the sun.
On the airplane home, the mother cried and the boy went to the bathroom and thought of his father as he peed, and then when he flushed he sent his pee like a message to his father because he imagined it flying out of the plane, free of him, into the world.
Go win the war, the boy thought, and come home. Or, he thought, don’t win the war and come home. Or, he thought, don’t come home but make Mother stop missing you. Or, he thought, make me stop missing you.
He rubbed his keys against his palm. He was almost thirteen. He washed his hands with the lavender airplane soap and returned to his seat.
He didn’t fit his eighth key until he was twenty years old.
His father did come back from the war after another year, but he was not the same man. He was scared of noises and he had a strange white blindness that he experienced when the day got too hot. The family considered moving, over and over, to cooler quarters; considered it, then unconsidered it. The boy took drama classes but always played the funny weird guy and never the leading man. He watched his mother take How to Make Glass II, the second in the series of five, and one afternoon she came home with a tote bag full of huge clear squares. She said this was her final exam for the class, and she’d gotten an A. Look, she said, pointing, no bubbles, she said. The boy asked her what they should do with it now that she’d made it. She said break it. So they took it outside and broke it in two and then his mother looked sad and sat down and the boy broke it in four, then eight, then sixteen, and his mother was still sad, she started to weep, softly, and the boy shattered the glass into hundreds of pieces.
His first girlfriend bought the chastity belt as a joke. He couldn’t open it. They scrambled around, used the tin key that it came packaged with, opened her up, had sex anyway. Her underwear was thin and full of holes and the boy kept it that night in his bed, after they had parted, and thought about the way she butted her head into his shoulder like a goat. When they broke up, he walked to the bank and put the underwear in the safe deposit box right on top of that one piece of gold. His mother never said a word about it. The bank had changed ownership by now and had a new color scheme-navy and dark green-but the lock was exactly the same.
His father went to the hospital for the blindness. He told the doctor that he saw whiteness everywhere, as if he’d been driving in the snow for days and days, and that he couldn’t find his balance or his peace. The hospital gave him painkillers and sunglasses. The boy’s father sat in the kitchen with a cup of milk in a mug, his palm covering the opening so he wouldn’t have to look at its white flat top and he said, It’s not like I saw anything that horrible. The son said, Really? and the father said, Son, the truth is I can’t even quite remember what I saw. Is it bright in here? he asked. The son looked outside at the setting sun and the lucid calm of dusk.
The eighth key fit the cabinet at a weaponry store. He went there for his college war survey class to learn the difference between muskets and spears. The man who owned the weapon store had a big belly and cheeks stretched over his face like poorly upholstered furniture. He would be hard to make in clay. The man was reading a book called How to Meet Girls, and when the boy asked to see some stuff, the man said he’d lost the key to the back cabinet where the small revolvers lived. The boy felt his finger itching, walked over, and opened it himself. The man’s cheeks raised a full inch on his face, furniture renewal. The boy shot some targets and felt like a soldier and wrote a brilliant report. He read How to Meet Girls cover to cover.
His mother came to his college graduation. His father could not because the light of the sun blinded him and seeing people all dressed in one kind of uniform reminded him of the army and made his head feel like it would explode. I can’t stand it, he told his son. All those bodies on the lawn in black graduation gowns. It’s like one huge goddamn foxhole. His mother wore a dress she’d made in her sewing class, with contrasting patches of velvet, burlap, silk.
He went to France for a graduation present. He returned to the Louvre, deciding he wanted to play more gin rummy. He located the door, but when he stuck his finger in the lock, it didn’t fit anymore. They had apparently changed locks since his last visit. This made him feel unsettled, as if kicked out of his own home. He wondered if that finger would find a new lock now. He thought: Yes. And no. And I don’t know.