And as I got to know his parents, I began to feel that way about my house even when I wasn’t with Thomas. When my mom and I had first moved into Frank’s, just before seventh grade, I’d felt like the kid on Silver Spoons—my new bedroom was the size of our old living room; the kitchen had two dishwashers and two sinks; in the backyard there was a little heated pool hidden by a hedge where Frank liked to float on Saturday afternoons. But now that I knew the Pells, now that I’d seen the look on Thomas’s face as Frank showed us how to turn on the jets, it all seemed pathetic, like a SkyMall catalog you could live inside. Could the Pells’ dim, golden dining room really exist just a few miles from this one with its fake fruit and stacks of Time magazine? My mom and Frank, the house, their whole lives, seemed now like a microwavable meal, plastic wrapped and artificially colored.
Thomas’s mom, Sally, sometimes asked polite questions about what it was like having a mom who was a pharmacist (“She must be just wonderful when you have the flu”), but I knew that they could never be friends, that they could never even really have a conversation, and I knew that Sally knew it too. She practiced some sort of law that was the opposite of my stepdad’s; she was always talking about fraud and city agencies and the lobbyists who actually wrote our legislation. She carried binders and tote bags. She might have been the only mom I knew with undyed gray hair. She’d taken to calling out both Thomas’s and my names as soon as she walked in the door. “Well, don’t you two look comfortable!” Her accent (she was from Georgia) made everything she said sound as if she were curtsying. “I was thinking about steak tonight—sound all right by you two?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Adam, you check with your folks?”
“They don’t mind!”
“Why not go ahead and give ’em a call, just to be sure.”
“OK!”
I’d never been around an adult who seemed actually to like me; not to love me, in the smothering and depressing and animal way my mom did, and not to feign interest in me, in the professional, blank-eyed way my teachers did, but actually to want to sit down and hear what I had to say about something. Sally would pour herself a glass of white wine and, while Thomas sat at his computer in the other room, say to me, “So, did they let y’all out to watch the verdict? Everyone in my office was gathered around a portable TV like it was a campfire.” Or she might ask me what I thought about the idea of seventy-minute periods, which the high school had just decided to try out. I had no practice in sitting at a table and coming up with opinions; it felt like learning to sing.
“Mom?” Thomas would call out without looking away from the computer. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, we’re just gossiping in here.” And then sometimes she’d say (I loved to hear this the way a cat loves having its back stroked), “Adam, I just love to talk to you. If Thomas was in charge I think I’d just slide his meals under the door and come get him when Richard gets home.”
A lot of Sally’s liking me, I knew, had to do with my influence on Thomas; she was happier to see him finally with a best friend than he was. Even the parents of a boy like Thomas, parents who are confident that their son will one day in the not too distant future write books and invent cures and design cathedrals, even they’re secretly worried that he spends too much time alone. And of course Thomas did, pre-me, spend huge amounts of time alone. At his computer he’d stare into games that seemed to consist of geometric figures shooting each other, pyramids sliding toward rectangles, beeping. He read for hours at a sitting. Never once do I remember him putting music on just to have it on; it would have been as weird as if he’d one day put on a Santa hat.
But I’m putting off describing Thomas’s dad, Richard. I have a sense, like someone trying to describe Michelangelo’s David, that I won’t be able to get any of the important parts of him onto the page. This would sound strange, maybe even crazy, to someone who was just meeting him for the first time; all you’d see would be a not particularly tall, ordinarily handsome, suburban D.C. dad in his forties, proud of his posture, serious about his handshake. But he had, if you stood close to him, a shimmer that certain people have, a kind of celebrity extra-reality, as if he existed both where you were with him and in movies or on newsclips. When I read The Odyssey, that first year of high school, it was Richard I always imagined as Odysseus—and I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Thomas told me that he was doing the same thing.