57

Mrs. McCallister stood at the beautiful old washbasin in the hallway, the one whose coiled brass tubes, like those of a sackbut or trombone, she kept buffed to a pristine shine. Her thick gray hair was just long enough to be put up in a pencil-spit bun. She poured a capful of white vinegar into the glass coffeepot and swirled it with an elbowy motion as Pella approached. “Ah, bella Pella,” she sang, “wherefore art thou? Where art thy fella?”

Pella had her wicker bag slung over one shoulder and her Westish-insignia backpack slung over the other. Together they contained everything she owned. “You’re in an awfully good mood,” she said. “Is my dad around?”

Mrs. McCallister rolled her eyes toward Affenlight’s office door. “For once,” she said. “My dear, you do have an effect on him. Ever since you arrived he’s been as hyper as my nine-year-old grandson. Can’t focus on anything. I told him I’m going to start putting Ritalin in his applesauce, the way they do for Luke.”

“I’m sure he’ll calm down eventually,” Pella said.

“Of course. And of course it’s wonderful that you’re here. There’s nothing like family.”

“Thank God for that.”

Mrs. McCallister laughed merrily. “You two are lucky to have each other.”

Her dad’s heavy wooden door was shut tight. Pella knocked once. Her dad cracked the door open and peered out, his cell phone tucked between shoulder and chin. Maybe he was talking to Owen—maybe Owen was telling him, in benignly neutral Owen-words, that his daughter was a whore.

“Pella.” He clapped the phone shut. “There you are.”

“Here I am.”

It was Monday; they hadn’t spoken since Friday, here in this office, with David sitting between them. She’d spent last night on Mike’s broken porch swing, waiting for him to come home, but he never did. She knew he was at the VAC—he was always at the VAC—but there was no way to penetrate that fortress after hours. He hadn’t returned her calls, not that anyone could blame him; it was possible he’d never speak to her again.

“I’m so sorry about dinner,” Affenlight said. “I got hung up in my meeting with Bruce Gibbs and…”

“So you said.”

“Well, I meant it. And I’m sorry. I wanted to be there to support you.”

These lies made Pella feel more guilty than angry—here she was, arms folded, foot tapping, paying out rope for her dad to wrap around his neck.

“And then all weekend when you didn’t come home I was so worried. We need to get you a new cell phone. I thought something terrible had happened.”

“Like I went back to San Francisco.”

“Well, yes. That was one scenario. Though I thought up more frightening ones, as I lay awake.” He did look haggard—his shoulders slumped, the lines around his eyes pronounced. “I know you’re not obliged to apprise me of your whereabouts. But when I didn’t see or hear from you for so long, my mind began to—”

“I saw you,” Pella interrupted. “On Saturday.”

He looked surprised. “Where?”

“At the baseball game. You were talking to Owen.”

Affenlight froze. “Owen…,” he said as if trying to place the name. When he began to speak he spoke fast, as if to induce Pella to forget what she’d said. “Yes, Owen’s doing much better. Wish I could say the same for Henry Skrimshander, the poor fellow. You know, I wrote a few pieces for The New Yorker when you were quite young, after my book came out. They had a fellow on staff everyone called the Gray Ghost. He’d written some wonderful pieces in the sixties—one about veterans of Korea I remember in particular—and ever since, he’d been showing up at the office every damned day, Monday to Friday, summertimes too, without ever turning in a single draft of a single article. You could hear his typewriter going great guns behind his door, and of course there were rumors about what he was working on, the opus to end all opera, but nobody ever saw a word of it. I’d come in to be put through the fact-checking wringer and he’d be wandering the hallways with this blank, stricken look on his face. He was done for and he knew it. That’s what Henry’s face reminded me of, when he walked off that field. The Gray Ghost.” There were two kinds of incompetent con men. Those who talked too much and those who didn’t talk enough. Affenlight, who was clearly of the former school, paused and shook his head. “Poor kid. I wish there was something that could be done—”

“Already taken care of,” Pella said acridly. “Look, Dad, we need to talk. I can’t live here anymore. I’m moving out.”

“What?” Affenlight looked baffled. “Now? Is this about David?”

“No.” The straps of her bags were cutting into her shoulders. She moved into the room and let them slide down onto the love seat, a temporary defeat. “I just need to get out of that apartment. It’s not big enough for both of us. It’s not even big enough for you. Books piled everywhere, closets stuffed full of junk. You’re sixty years old. Do you really want to live in a dorm for the rest of your life?”

Affenlight looked dumbly up at the ceiling, above which his apartment lay. “I like it here.”

Pella tapped a flip-flop on the floorboards, annoyed at herself for the obliqueness of her approach. When she complained about her dad’s living arrangement, what she meant was that he should live in a way that was quote-unquote “normal” for a man his age—id est, without Owen. Still, she kept at it, unable to bring herself to be more direct. “Why not buy a house?”

Affenlight smiled ruefully. “Where were you eight years ago? The school wanted to sell us the outgoing president’s place for pennies on the dollar. But I figured I’d get too lonely, rattling around in a big old house all by myself. Instead it went on the market, got snapped up by some physics professor who made a killing on tech stocks in the nineties. Like I should have done.”

“You’ve done all right.”

“I’ve done all right,” Affenlight agreed.

“Anyway,” Pella said. “I’m not a kid anymore and we’re not a married couple. I think things will go more smoothly if we each have our own place. Okay?”

Affenlight nodded slowly. “Okay.”

“Don’t look so glum,” she said. “Now you can have guests stay over.”

Affenlight chuckled, or tried to. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Like whom?”

It was the classic criminal error, that like whom—the longing to get caught, to take credit for the crime. Pella steeled herself. “Like Owen.”

A profound, interstellar kind of silence filled the office. Eventually Affenlight said, “I was planning to tell you.”

“When, on your deathbed?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Or a little after that.”

Pella felt a return of that same urge she’d felt at the baseball diamond—the urge to protect her father from onrushing harm. He was so naive, so boyish. She remembered how he looked while talking to Owen by the fence: Like the thousand other people in the park didn’t exist. Like if they existed, they couldn’t see how he felt about Owen. Like if they could see how he felt about Owen, they’d condone or forgive him. But people didn’t forgive you for doing what felt right—that was the last thing they forgave you for.

“How long has this been going on?” she asked.

“Not long.”

“Not long with Owen, or”—she didn’t know how to put it—“in general?”

Affenlight lifted his eyes from the floor. “There is no in general,” he said. “Just Owen.”

He wasn’t old but he looked it now, his arms limp at his sides, deep lines of worry scored into his forehead beneath his mussed gray-silver hair, his expression sad and beseeching. Why was the younger person always the prize, the older person always the striver? Ever since adolescence Pella had been gathering experience in the role of the younger person, the clung-to one, the beloved. That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed. Really it made no sense. What were the old hoping the young would become? Something other than old? It hadn’t happened yet. But the old kept trying.

By the old she meant everyone who loved something younger—her dad but also David, and even the twentysomething guys she’d hooked up with in high school. Everyone always reaching back through the past, past their own mistakes. You could say that young people were desired because they had smooth bodies and excellent reproductive chances, but you’d mostly be missing the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate to redo. “He’s a kid,” she said. “He’s younger than I am.”

Affenlight nodded. “I know.”

“What if somebody finds out? Then what happens to us?” The us was a touch melodramatic.

“I don’t know,” said Affenlight.

“But you’re in love with him.”

“Yes.”

“Well, great,” Pella said. “Amor vincit omnia.” What she was thinking was even crueler: He’s going to break your heart.

She hoisted her bags and moved toward her dad. For the happiest and splittest of seconds Affenlight thought she planned to embrace him, but her hands were wrapped tightly around the straps of her bags, and in fact he was simply blocking her way. He shifted aside, leaving several inches of troubled air between them as his daughter ducked her beautiful port-colored head and slid past him and down the hallway and out of sight.