Babylon and Other Stories (30 page)

Ivy and I still played every once in a while, but only, I think, because she didn't want to cut me off immediately after reaching her objective; she was trying to be polite, or sensitive, or something. The talks under the trees got shorter, though. During one of the last ones, I asked her—emboldened by my understanding that the talks were coming to an end—whether she was having real, adult conversations with Patrick Goddard. She just looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about. Then she said, “Look, girls have to get experience somehow. And high school guys—no offense, but they don't know what the hell they're doing. The guys at school, they'll get drunk and feel me up and I'll be like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I feel like saying, ‘Hey, what are you even trying to
accomplish
down there?’ I almost feel bad for them, and that's not a good thing to have happen. You know why?”

I didn't.

“You wind up giving it away out of pity,” she said flatly. “And pity, Kyle, is the worst.”

But Ivy was wrong. It wasn't the worst, not at all, not even in the same neighborhood. The worst was that one morning I came down to find my parents standing in the kitchen. The phone had
just rung. Generally my parents ignored me at breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and refusing to make any conversation whatsoever until they'd finished their first cups of coffee. On this day, though, my mother was actually cooking, frying eggs and sausages, and pouring glasses of juice. I sat down and started to eat without asking any questions.

After watching me for a few minutes, my father cleared his throat and spoke. “Ivy McAllister died last night in a car accident,” he said. “She and Patrick Goddard were driving home at midnight and he lost control of the car. They hit the highway median and rolled over. Patrick's in critical condition but he's going to survive. We just heard from one of the neighbors.”

I put my fork down. It was years before I ate eggs again. “He was drunk,” I said.

“They didn't say anything about that,” my father said in a measured tone.

My mother looked at me. “What makes you say that?”

“I just know,” I said.

I left the house and drove around for hours, all that day and well into the night, passing through all the dark, safe, suburban streets, and when I got back at one in the morning my parents were sitting straight-backed on the couch, waiting for me to come home.

Neither my father nor I returned to the tennis club for the rest of the summer. He was obviously not going to play with Frank, and I planned never to go back to the tennis club ever in my life. My plan was to avoid all the places I had ever seen Ivy; that way, I reasoned, it wouldn't be so glaringly obvious she was gone. I was helped in this line of thought by the fact that I was leaving home at the end of August. I had another terrible summer job, packing
boxes in a factory, and worked as much overtime as I could, exhausting myself day and night.

When my father drove me to college he tried to get me to talk about her—he knew how I felt, and I knew he knew—but I just wouldn't, or couldn't, and I never did. Even over the years, even after I went back to the club, I never talked about Ivy with my parents, and if the subject came up with people from school, people who'd also known her, I changed the subject or left the room. I only rarely talked about her, with people who'd never met her; it was as if she belonged to me, and couldn't be shared.

My father and I stopped using “McAllister” as a code word, and so far as I know he never played with Frank again. They lost touch, and anyway it wasn't as if they were ever really friends; they just played tennis together for three years. My father played with a rotating succession of partners and, when I was home in the summers, with me. We slipped into long, lazy matches in which we focused as much on maintaining long rallies as we did on hitting good shots; there was a harmony between us, on and off the court, that only increased the older I got. Though I'd been playing tennis all my life, it was in those later years, after I graduated from school, that I really fell in love with the game, its easy back and forth, the thud and twang of racket strings, the shadows of trees over an asphalt court on an otherwise sunny day. There was no more graceful moment, I came to see, than the finite silence of the ball before it hit and bounced, no more satisfying equation than a strong serve meeting a stronger return. It was like my father always said: it was a game of finesse.

Of course we saw the McAllisters from time to time, in the store or on the street, and news of them reached us now and then. What happened was that Frank, to no one's great surprise, left Beth Ann for Eleanor MacElvoy. Beth Ann kept the house
and was given custody of Melissa. Frank had two more kids with Eleanor, strapping, poorly behaved blond children, according to my mother, who thought Beth Ann had gotten the short end of the marital stick. I couldn't help wondering if he would've gone through with leaving Beth Ann if it hadn't been for Ivy dying. But of course there was no telling. The world would have been different in a million ways if she hadn't died, and that was only one of them.

As I got older I came home less often—saddled by job commitments and, eventually, family ones as well—but always visited at least once in the summer, and my father and I always played tennis when I did. The game grew into a staged ritual for us, less sport than ceremony, a language each of us spoke best with the other. My father stood practically glued to the baseline with stiff knees, his old man's legs seeming too thin to support the rest of his body. He'd stretch his arms out far, then farther, to return my shots, with his feet unmoving, and if one made it past him, which happened all the time, he'd only shrug. He'd grown philosophical to an intense degree. Then, in his seventy-fifth year, he was diagnosed with cancer and soon became too sick from the treatments to play. Over a period of months he grew thinner, older, sicker, and a year later, philosophical even then, he said good-bye to us and died.

My mother and I shared the work that followed his death: arranging the funeral, settling the estate, selling the house. She was going to live with her sister out West, and I wasn't going to be coming home anymore, not to this home, anyway.

On a windless, quiet Sunday I went to hit a few last balls at the club with Anil Chaudury, who still lived in town. It was a cool July afternoon; a front had blown through the night before, and the air still held the wetness of it. We served a few balls, slowly,
no hurry. On the next court over, a father was yelling instructions to his teenaged son, and I stared at them for a second, awash in memory, before realizing that the father was Frank McAllister. He'd grown stout in his middle years, his face rounder and redder, and his hair was almost gone; but he still ran back and forth to the net like a bounding Labrador, and was trying to teach his son to do the same. The boy was thin and freckled and had very blond hair. He looked around fifteen.

Does it make any sense to say that although I was grieving for my father—whom I had the joy of loving and of knowing well, as a friend and as a parent—it was at that moment, thinking about Ivy, that I thought my heart would break? All of a sudden I was fighting back tears. It seemed crazy to me that I had gone on living without her all these years, that the world had somehow kept functioning, that anyone had grown reconciled to the death of a seventeen-year-old girl. From the other side of the net, Anil asked if I was okay. I lifted my palm to him, asking for a pause, then walked over to Frank McAllister and said hello.

“Hey there!” he said right away, holding out his hand. “How are
you
?” He seemed so happy to see me that I didn't realize at first he had no idea who I was. He was just that kind of guy—a meeter and greeter—and he never turned it off.

“Kyle Hoffman,” I said. “You used to play tennis with my dad.”

“Is that a fact.” He stood there nodding and grinning.

“Dean Hoffman,” I said. “You were his nemesis.”

“Nemesis!” Frank McAllister said, shaking his head in hearty amusement. He didn't have a clue what I was talking about.

“I was a friend of Ivy's,” I said.

The smile never left his face. It had been false to begin with, and it stayed false. “Well, nice to see you,” he said, and shook my hand again.

I saw that he didn't want to hear that I'd known Ivy or— which I'd almost said—that I'd loved her. He didn't want to talk about her any more than I wanted to talk about her with the people she and I had gone to high school with. He wanted her to belong to him, too.

“Dad,” his son called from the other side of the net, “can I get a drink?”

“Sure thing, kiddo,” Frank said.

“You want to hit a few balls?” I said.

“Hey, that sounds
great
!” Frank said. “I'm in the book. Give me a call.”

“I meant right now,” I said. “Unless you're too tired.”

He watched his kid, who was talking to another teenager over by the Coke machine, and nodded. He looked winded from all his bounding, but I could tell he didn't want to admit it. “Sure thing,” he said. “Why the hell not?”

I ran over and explained to Anil that I was going to play with my father's old partner for a few minutes. He hadn't kept up his game and looked relieved, wandering over to the sidelines.

I took my place at the baseline. Frank McAllister was bouncing the ball against his racket, getting ready to serve. As I crouched there, I began trembling with anger. I wanted to beat the shit out of Frank McAllister, humiliate him in front of his kid, make him feel tired and pathetic. I knew I could do it, too; he looked out of breath and old. I wanted to beat him not because he wouldn't talk about Ivy but because he didn't remember my father. We had mythologized the McAllisters, had loved them, and he didn't even know who we were, just as Ivy had never known who I was, not really, never cared to find out before she'd gone off and died. To the McAllisters we were nothing. The world, I thought then, is divided into sides just like a tennis court is: into winners and losers, into forgetters and forgotten.

I realized that my father had always known which side he was on, and he didn't care. He was even, I thought, proud. All around me was the sound of his game, of rubber soles and asphalt and the hiccup of a ball crashing into the net; and, beyond that, the sound of the suburbs on a summer afternoon, the lawn mowers and radios and family conversations. Across the court, Frank McAllister asked me if I was ready.

“Sure thing,” I said, and prepared myself to lose.

by H. G. Higginbottom, Ph.D. Department of Biology, Western University

This paper will address the root causes and consequences of some troublesome recent behavior by Hank Higginbottom, Ph.D. Professor Higginbottom studies sexual selection in
Poecilia reticulata,
aka the Trinidadian guppy. In his office, on the sixth floor of a concrete building in the southwest corner of the university campus, his main enjoyment comes from the blue burble of the tanks and the swishing, distinctively orange-spotted bodies of
Poecilia reticulata
within them. It's a precarious enjoyment, a calm easily disturbed. It's most easily—and frequently—disturbed by Joseph Purdy, who studies sexual selection in the human male, whose office is located next door, whose research is more provocative and better funded than Hank's, and who therefore has a much nicer and larger lab, with windows, even though said research seems to take place mainly through the observation of pickup lines in bars and therefore does not even require much office space, and whose seemingly favorite activity during the day is to stroll into Hank's office wearing his cowboy boots and
offer Hank some deer jerky from an animal he has personally shot himself. On the day in question Hank responded to this offer with a right hook to Joseph Purdy's angular jaw, landing Purdy in the hospital.

In all honesty, the day did not begin well. It began as so many had lately—with Erica crying in bed in the silent fashion she had, without noises or sniffling, and what really got to Hank was how she could get up, turn off the alarm, start the coffee, and get dressed, all without ever acknowledging that she was crying, without so much as wiping away a single tear. She stayed stony-faced while tears ran in multiple streams down her cheeks, the snot swimming down from her nostrils; she wouldn't lift a hand to wipe the snot off her face, and Hank knew she did this to broadcast her suffering and his role in it, that
even her mucus
was a personal indictment of him and of their life together. Even Max, who was only five and not generally perceptive of adult behavior—in fact his own behavior was causing a lot of problems and costing Hank and Erica some serious money in child therapy bills—looked at his father and asked what was wrong with Mommy. Hank only shrugged—which he knew Erica hated, but still couldn't stop doing—and told Max to get dressed.

Then, as Hank drove him to kindergarten, Max threw a fit because he wouldn't pull over and buy him some ice cream, even though it was eight o'clock in the morning and Hank had explained the proper moments and places for the eating of ice cream time and time again. Obtuseness was the major facet of Max's personality—that and anger. No one knew where it came from, the anger, not Hank, not Erica, not the teachers or the therapists.
They gave him crayons and he drew mushroom clouds and corpses with blood pooling around them in waxy, Razzmatazz Red streaks. They gave him toys at group playtime and he threw the toys at the other children, whose parents later (and understandably) requested that he be removed. Max, in general, hit people. He was a disturbed child. After a while the teachers and therapists who'd once nodded sympathetically in conversation with Hank and Erica began to look at them searchingly and then stare down at their own hands, as if there were questions in their minds they weren't quite sure how to phrase. Hank knew what those questions were. In fact it came down to only one question:

What kind of people are you, that you produced this child?