At the Bottom of Everything(14)

Richard wore jeans, T-shirts, sweaters, plaid shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Later, when I was in my early twenties, I realized that the style I was going for, the look I had whenever I most approved of what I saw in the mirror, was Richard’s. He had a pink bald head and close-set, Doberman-ish eyes. He was as thin as Thomas, but he was athletic—he was the only dad I knew who worked out, though his working out actually wasn’t anything like what we (or people slightly older than us) did. He ran; every morning you could find him out before sunrise, floating along the edge of Connecticut, wearing weightless clothes and white Reeboks battered brown. He also rowed, alone, out on the Potomac. Until seeing him I hadn’t known that this was a sport, but there he was on this boat that looked, with his oars going and himself sliding up and down, up and down, like some sort of floating insect. Racing into a V of ripples, disappearing under bridges, while Thomas and I walked alongside onshore. At home he did chin-ups on the bar between the kitchen and the front hall, what seemed to me countless at the time but really couldn’t have been any more than, what, twenty? I imagined that he would have been capable of tearing up railroad ties or punching through doors. In one of my most vivid memories of him, Thomas is hanging from his legs and Richard isn’t slowed down in the least; you’d only know he was having to do any extra work at all by the slight smile that joined his usual workout expression.

Even at twelve, thirteen years old I understood: I wanted him to be my father. And he was, to an extent that couldn’t possibly have delighted me more, up for the job. He was a teacher. Not just literally (he taught about the Civil War at Georgetown) but in terms of temperament, inclinations. He knew things. He attracted disciples. I couldn’t talk to him for five minutes without learning some astonishing thing, some way of thinking, that I wouldn’t be able to wait to misquote as my own.

For instance:

“The early Christians, the people who were coming up with this stuff, they weren’t going to movies, they weren’t living in cities. They were farmers. Farmers of what in particular? Grapes. And you’ve probably never seen grapes grow, but the plant is this hideous, gnarly thing, like a hand with arthritis. And the grapes come up, and then they vanish. Just leaving the hand again. And then back they come the next season. And so what did these people, watching the holy life—because a crop to a farmer is holy—birth and death, birth and death, come up with? Resurrection. Reembodiment. Lazarus. Christ was a crop. He has risen.”

Or:

“So there’s impression, the buzz of sensory data, and the mind says, Sir, yes, sir, and constructs a world, a story, fits it all together, hides the circuitry. Which people think ends as a dorm room chew toy: is my green your green, OK, boring, got it. But now neuroscience is saying, What if the you who thinks he gets it is a story too? What if ‘you’ are just the face your mind makes out of the disconnected dots? Have you ever seen a Chuck Close?”

After dinner, once Sally had gone back into the living room, I would sit at the table with Thomas and Richard, silently sucking on what I had to say, what I’d been planning to say for the past ten minutes, wondering whether it would, in some way I couldn’t forecast, reveal me as not having understood what they were talking about.

But when I’d finally hold my breath and come out with it—my question about why, if Catholics believed so much in the life of the fetus, they didn’t hold funerals for miscarriages, or my idea about how the American colonists could have rationalized what they did to the Indians—Richard would, almost without fail, respond in such a way as to convince me, for as long as we were talking, that I was every bit as smart as Thomas, that my brain too was a rare burden. “ ‘Ignorance is not an excuse.’ That’s very, very good. Wow. I may have to use that.”

Sally sometimes sang in the other room, and Richard would stop talking to listen, and close his eyes, as if he were about to sneeze. One night, alarmingly, he said, “Jesus, I love that woman.”

“I think my parents have a lot of sex,” Thomas said once when we were walking along the bike path. “Like a lot.”

I didn’t understand at the time that this was a kind of bragging, or if I did understand, it didn’t bother me, because I felt that the glow of it included me. “Adam,” Sally said one night, “pretty soon we’re going to get so we’re just going to fill out adoption papers for you. Your mom and I may just have a tug-of-war.”





Anna and I met again that Friday afternoon, while Nicholas and Teddy were over at friends’ houses (she answered the door in a blue silk kimono). On Sunday when they were with their father. The next Wednesday during music lessons. We were like teenagers.