The Candy House(15)
“But we swam,” the girl pleaded.
“You swam great. But no TV.”
“Twins?” Kristen asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Sally and Ricky. Kiddos, say hello to my old friends—well, old and new,” he said with a wink at Kristen.
“Pleased to meet you,” the children intoned, eyeing them warily.
“They’re sad because it’s almost time to go. Right, kiddos?”
“We’re sad because we want to watch TV,” the boy said.
“Story of my life,” Jack said with a laugh.
He brought Alfred and Kristen each an Old Style, and they sat on folding lawn chairs in the paved space between the back door and the garage. Alfred gave a blunt accounting of his father’s remarriage to Portia, a fellow art historian hardly older than Miles, and fatherhood to a toddler. Jack already knew of Miles’s ascendency in Chicago’s legal world. When it came to their mother, he nodded stiffly and said, “Good lady.”
“What about Ames?” Jack asked, for Alfred had forgotten to include him. “Still the army?” He chortled when Alfred cataloged the “retirement” from Special Ops and cryptic overseas activities. “Go, Ames,” Jack said.
For his own part, he told them, he couldn’t complain. He’d been laid off a year into the recession and was doing part-time work to cover the bills, collection agencies perpetually on his ass, but he liked the easier hours, had sharpened up his bowling game and played in a league three nights a week, but most of all he just loved his kids, although he had to fight for time with them—his ex was greedy, everything was about her; unfaithful, too, but that was another story, and look at those beautiful kids, they were part her, he supposed, though it was hard to see. He wished he could move with them back upstate; Christ, he missed the lakes, Lake Michigan was more like an ocean, there were shipwrecks at the bottom, but he couldn’t leave Chicago, no way—he’d camp out in his ex’s lobby just to be near his kids… and then the three-toned doorbell sounded and the children cried, “Mommy!” and there was a sound of stamping feet inside the house. Jack set his can of Old Style in the chair’s fitted cylinder, stood up heavily, and went inside.
Alfred and Kristen sat in silence as a murmur of voices drifted through the house from the front door to the back. He felt Kristen watching him. Finally, she said, “Alfred, this guy is a mess.”
The voices grew strident. Alfred caught Dan and I want to go away next month and felt a tightness approaching pain in his chest.
“Can you not see that?” Kristen asked.
“Of course I see it.”
“So? Why aren’t you screaming? Or demanding that he cut the bullshit and admit he’s a failure?”
The suggestion shocked him. “Why would I do that?” he said. “The truth is right there.”
“Isn’t it always?”
The argument crescendoed, then cut off. The front door shut decisively, and the removal of children’s voices to outdoors left a vacuum inside the house. Car doors opened, closed. Alfred pictured Jack watching their departure through the small rectangular windows in his front door.
After a while, Jack reemerged with three more Old Styles. The grin flashed, and he eased himself onto the chair and took a long drink. The sun had dropped, leaving the sky a worn-out pink. A moon was already up, soft and translucent as a sea turtle egg.
“Sunsets are weird here,” Jack said half-heartedly. “Compared to the lakes.”
“Nothing is really like the lakes,” Alfred rejoined with energy.
“What are they like? The lakes of Upstate New York?” Kristen asked, and turned her hungry bird’s-beak eyes upon Jack.
He took another long sip, as if mustering the will to respond. “Well, the sky is bright,” he said at last, “but there’s this ring of dark trees around each lake. So even at night, you’re looking up from inside that darker ring at a lighter sky.”
“And the geese,” Alfred said.
“Oh, the geese!” Jack said. “Christ, those geese.”
“I made a film about geese,” Alfred said.
Jack turned to him, alert to bluffing. “You did not.”
“It’s called The Migratory Patterns of North American Geese.”
Jack began to laugh. “Come on.”
“I spent five years on it,” Alfred said. “But it didn’t really work. I see that now.”
The disclosure had a revivifying effect upon Jack. He leaned forward in his folding chair. “Okay: Act One, Scene One,” he said. “Walk me through.”
“?‘Strange as it may seem to humans,’?” Alfred recited from memory, “?‘for whom performance has become an essential part of everyday life, animals are focused entirely on survival.’?”
“You haven’t got the tone right,” Kristen said. “Too much expression.”
“She’s right,” Alfred said. Assuming a robotic monotone, he went on, “?‘To a human, a goose’s wish to return to its Canadian home may seem sentimental, but “wish” and “home” don’t mean to a goose what they mean to a human.’?”
Jack convulsed with laughter. “Was it all like that?”
“Three hours and seven minutes,” Kristen said.