Father of the Rain (33 page)

“Jason Mullens,” he says finally. “Patrick’s buddy.”

“Damn.” While I remained in school, other people were going out and growing up and getting real jobs and wearing uniforms, for chrissake. “I cannot believe I know a cop.”

He laughs again, and I stand and give him a hug. He is very hard and bumpy with his oblong chest and badge and buttons and buckles. I am used to slender, unshaven, underexercised men in flannel shirts. It’s like being introduced to a different species.

He slides into the seat across from mine and puts his thick forearms on the table. My waitress brings him a coffee cup and fills it.

“Thanks, Amy,” he says quietly, as if he is aware that he’s a cliché, like something out of the
Andy Griffith Show
, but can’t help his good manners.

“I’m stunned. You became a cop. I am sitting here across from a cop.” It is so preposterous that wily little Jason Mullens has grown up into this that I feel completely comfortable, as if it isn’t really happening. “Why on earth are you a cop?”

“It’s kind of a long story.” He glances over at his buddies. They’re talking to an older couple, their backs to us. “I was planning to be a lawyer but then my dad’s friend got me this job in a law firm for a summer during college and I watched these guys spend their time trying to get around the law for their clients. It really bugged me.” He looks down at his hands; then he looks up, surprised that I’m waiting for him to say more. “I realized I wanted to uphold the law, not try to bend it.”

“But you were such a rule-breaking hellion.”

He lifts his eyes to the ceiling, smiling. “Especially at your house.” His perfectly shaven cheeks are round and shiny.

“How is Patrick? I’ve been wanting to get in touch with him, but—” I don’t know how to finish.

“Yeah, I heard about your dad and Catherine. I’m sorry. Patrick was here a couple of weeks ago, helping her move into her new place.”

I heard she’d rented a carriage house north of town. But Patrick was here in Ashing and I didn’t see him? Why hadn’t I called him months ago?

“I didn’t see him either,” he says, seeing my disappointment. “I was away that weekend.”

One of the other policemen is at the door, the other two already on the sidewalk outside. Jason holds up a finger and the last cop gives him an indulgent smile.

I can’t believe he actually thinks Jason is trying to hit on me.

Then Jason says, “I’m off at midnight. You wanna do something?”

“At midnight?”

“Mel’s is open until two.”

So we meet at Mel’s. I wait in my car until I see him pull up. He looks even broader in civilian clothes. He smells clean, his thick hair damp and combed straight down. Everyone knows him at the bar. He introduces me around. I watch Jason joust and parry reluctantly with the crowd. He’s in his element but he worries about me. He tries to include me. He doesn’t understand that it feels good to hold a beer bottle in a bar with people my age who are all a little too buzzed to care what I’m saying. It’s been so long since I’ve had any alcohol that the beer takes full effect and pulls me away from myself just a little. Normally I don’t like the feeling, but right now it’s a relief. People crowd around Jason. Someone offers him a shot and he looks at me and turns it down. Someone says something quietly to him and he laughs until his face gets red. “I’ll explain that one later,” he says to me. Like Garvey, Jason has changed socioeconomic groups, and I’m interested in this. I hope we’ll stay till closing, but instead of ordering another round he steers me out the door.

We go to his apartment, the second floor of a house on South Street. It smells like a gym. He runs around picking up the balled-up clothes and dirty glasses. He opens the windows and turns on a fan and hands me a beer. We sit on a red velour couch and he pulls
off his shirt as if wearing it was causing him pain. It is truly a rippling torso, wide and deep, with very little hair and tiny tight nipples, tapering down into a narrow taut stomach with a deep clean belly button. He takes my hand and lays it on his chest and I cannot pull away. I have to know how it all feels. My fingers trace the skin across his chest, pausing at the dip in the center, then moving to the far side and over to his right arm which he is not flexing but is solid as steel, wrapped in veins. And then I am kissing his hard warm stomach, pressing my tongue in the taut belly button, and he is hard immediately and sighing and I feel his lips on my neck before he lifts me in one quick motion right on top of him and we kiss, hard, our teeth knocking, and then I hear Jonathan, slightly bemused, taking everything in, the gun he surely has in the house, the uniforms, the absurdly inflated pale chest, saying, “What do you think you are doing, tweet?” Jonathan, tracing my hip with his beautiful finger, talking about babies. I stop kissing and rest my head on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Jason. I’m so sorry.”

His hands are moving all over me. “It’s okay.”

On one vacation, when I was in high school, I had a room right next to my father and Catherine, separated by a very thin wall. “So now you don’t want it,” I heard him say to her in the middle of the night. “I thought you wanted it, but now you don’t want it.”

A vast heaviness weighs down my body.

“Really, it’s okay, Daley.”

He helps me find my shirt and shoes.

“It’s my fault,” he says when I’m at the door. “I took it too fast. I misinterpreted the signals.” It sounds like a line from some educational video on sexual communication. “I always had a little thing for you.” He’s lying now, poor guy. No one had a thing for me back then, not even a little one. He tries to hold my face in his hand to gauge my distress, but I turn and get out the door.

I didn’t have a boyfriend until college. Before that, the only time I can remember even the possibility of one was when Patrick came home from boarding school one weekend with a friend, After dinner that first night, Patrick asked me if I liked Cole. I said I thought so. He told me that Cole liked me, then teased me about how fast my face turned red. I waited for something to happen, but it never did, even though I liked him more and more. He was very funny and smart, quick but not mean. The three of us played Ping-Pong, saw a movie, went to the Peking Garden. I laughed at Cole’s jokes and he laughed at mine, but nothing else happened. They took the train back to school on Sunday. The next time Patrick came home I asked him, jokingly, trying to hide the hours I’d agonized over it, what had made Cole change his mind about me, and Patrick looked at me oddly.

“It’s like you don’t get it,” he said.

“Get what?”

“After I told you he liked you, everything you did said stay away.”

I was stung and stunned by this.
Stay away
. I somehow said
stay away
with my outside while my inside was yelling
come here
.

“I cannot believe you made out with a cop. You really do have a thing for uniforms,” Julie says.

“Please don’t tell anyone.” I mean Jonathan. If she is in touch with him. Which is a question I never ask. It’s better for me not to know.

“So what are you doing on the Thursday before Columbus Day weekend?” she says.

“Not much. No, actually,” I say, pretending to look at a calendar, “it’s a very hectic day. The dogs are going in to have their toe-nails clipped.”

“I cannot get there too soon.”

“What?”

“My father’s birthday present. A night in New York to celebrate my grandparents’ fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, then a trip up the New England coast. Give me directions to your house.”

“Whoever that was put a smile on your face,” my father says.

“My friend Julie. She and her father are coming here next Thursday.”

“To stay with us?”

“No, just for lunch. I think we should take them to the Lobster Shack.”

“What’s this
we
shit?”

“Oh, Dad, please join us. I want you to meet her. She’s my very best friend.”

“Is she your vewy vewy bestest fwiend? Bester than me and Maybelle?”

“It’s a three-way tie,” I say, rubbing Maybelle’s little head.

“Where’re they from?”

“Brooklyn. But he lives in San Francisco now and she lives in Albuquerque.”

“San Francisco. He a fag?”

“Dad.”

“I’m just wondering.”

“He’s had three wives.”

“Jesus.”

I don’t bother to remind him that he is not far behind.

“What’s he do?”

“He’s a doctor.” I didn’t want to tell him that, either. He doesn’t like being around strangers with successful careers. At least I was careful not to say Jewish psychiatrist.

On Thursday he is cranky all morning. The tractor isn’t working properly. The new guy at the hardware store is useless. He screams at the dogs. I see him glance at the clock, like he used to, waiting for it to be drinking hour. I think he does it to get a rise out of me, but I don’t react.

And then they are here, Julie leaping out of the car even before her father cuts the engine, dodging the dogs up the path, reaching me at the bottom of the porch stairs. She’s cut her hair straight across at the jawline. She told me but I forgot. She’s wearing new clothes. She looks different, older. She’s a full professor now. It’s disorienting, seeing her here in my yard. She is Michigan and card games and all-nighters and Jonathan on the floor with us because we never did get a kitchen table, all of us eating his $3 spaghetti. Her hug is tight. There are so many things I can’t have back.

“This town is so cute! I’m not sure I ever knew it was on the water, I mean
right
on the water. I always pictured it so gloomy and sinister. And this house is enormous. It’s like a B & B.”

Her father comes up the walkway, tucking in the back of his shirt. “I’m starting to understand why even Berkeley might have paled in comparison.” He kisses me on the cheek.

“It wasn’t really a choice of geography, per se.” I hear the sudden peevishness in my voice and soften it. “Thank you for making the detour for me.”

“Hardly a detour. You were always part of the plan,” he says.

I haven’t seen Julie’s father in a couple of years. He looks the same, a medium-sized man with a full head of silver hair he wears cropped square, a grown-out buzz cut. I wonder if he remembers
the diamond-in-the-rough comment and what he will say after this visit. There’s always the expectation on Julie’s part that we will get along instantly. But it has always hurt a little to be around them.

My father comes out on the porch. I lead them up to meet him.

“You found us,” he says, and puts out his hand. “Gardiner Amory.”

“Alex Kellerman.”

There’s always tremendous subtext when two men of their generation shake hands. It’s always a power grab. I watch my father accentuate his height advantage while Alex stands with his thick legs too far apart, as if he might need to crouch and spring.

“And this is Julie, Dad.”

My father’s shoulders soften and he bends his elbow as he takes her hand. “Great to meet you. I know Daley misses you a lot. Her housemate now isn’t much fun.”

I’ve never in my adult life introduced my father to anyone.

Alex peers in the house. He wants to have a look around, as I would in his place. But I only have a few hours with Julie and do not want to spend it in the New England WASP Museum. I suggest a walk on the beach and then lunch in town. Alex asks if he could use the restroom.

I walk him through the pantry and dining room to the bathroom off the den.

“The light’s a little tricky,” I say, punching the round black cylinder hard.

“Whoa,” he says, noticing the team photographs. At the feet of the boys in the front row was always the same black board with white letters and numbers identifying the team and the date. 1940–1949 were the years accounted for at St. Paul’s, and I knew that wouldn’t slip Julie’s father’s notice. Two great-uncles of Julie’s had died at Treblinka while my father was at a fancy boarding school.

“Which one is your dad?” he asks, tapping the glass of the Football Thirds, 1941.

I put my finger on the smallest boy in front, looking warily ahead but not at the camera.

“He looks scared, doesn’t he? Imagine having been shipped away from your mother at such a young age. Hey, here he looks about twelve and already on varsity,” he says, tapping another picture.

“He was always good at tennis.”

“He’s half the size of his teammates.”

“He was really small, and then he shot up. Look.” I point to a photograph on the other side of the bathroom, near the sink. In it my father is on the far right, his hair darker and his face much narrower, holding one of the oars, the tallest man on the team. He looks as if he has better things to do than stand around having his photograph taken by some moron.

“It’s a real slice of history, isn’t it?” he says.

“One privileged sliver of it, I suppose.” All the St. Paul’s boys stare at me, fresh cut grass on their cleats. Then I remember Alex wants to go to the bathroom and I quickly leave him to it.

On the porch, my father and Julie seem to be talking about pool vacuums. He’s making an effort with her. He’s facing her directly, not looking off somewhere like he often does with people, and bending toward her to make sure he hears her response. He asks if she’s made some friends in Albuquerque yet, and she says she thought in a warmer climate people would be more approachable, but the people in her apartment building are always rushing downstairs with mountain bikes on their shoulders, no time to chat.

“You’ll have to get yourself a mountain bike, I guess,” my father says.

“Yup. Right about when hell freezes over.”

My father laughs. Julie, I see now, is the kind of woman my father would call a real pistol.

We get in their rental car, the men in front.

“So here we are with our fathers,” I say quietly.

“Just another regular day,” Julie says.

We look at the backs of their heads and laugh.

I point out the Vance sisters’ driveway.

“The ones who called each other mother and father,” Julie says, as if it’s from a book she read a long time ago.