with no company but my crazed own, and braids would give me a headache, and I’d need some human connection, at least for short periods between restful bouts of solitude.
If only I didn’t find most of those connections so awkward and irksome.
On our next Wednesday morning walk, Sylvia says, “So I think Ben’s started drinking now, for sure.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I went to unpack his bag from the soccer tournament and I found a can of beer wrapped up in one of his soccer socks, inside his shin pads.”
“That’s a clever way of hiding it.”
Sylvia glares.
“I meant, maybe he was carrying it for someone.”
“Or maybe it was the one left over after he drank five others in his hotel room with those punks on the soccer team.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“I left it there and told him to unpack his bag, waited until he had, and searched his room the next day and couldn’t find it anywhere.”
“You see — he was carrying it for someone.”
“What would you do if this happened with Jesse?”
“Jesse can’t drink beer. He’s allergic to the gluten in malt.”
“What if he was drinking vodka, then?”
“I guess I’d think it was quasi-normal teenage behaviour but be worried to death every time he went out.”
“What I can’t get over is that Ben had a whole scheme worked out in advance for hiding the beer so the cans wouldn’t clank around. This from the kid who’s incapable of doing a homework assignment at any minute but the last.”
“Why are you so surprised? What were you doing at his age?”
“Harbouring unrequited crushes and feeling insecure, of course. Weren’t you?”
“Yes, but if we didn’t start acting out until we were sixteen or so, that’s only because time moved slower then, back in the Chaucerian era.”
“So I told Ed we needed to sit down and have a talk with Ben about drinking and partying and whether he wants to throw his life away or succeed.”
Sylvia is a big proponent of the kind of heart-to-heart talks featured on sappy family television dramas. My equally ineffective approach with Jesse when issues arise is to employ the one- or two-minute whiny plead tactic.
“And the worst thing,” Sylvia says, “was that when I talked to Ed, he chuckled and said, ‘That’s my boy!’ and asked me if Ben was dating anyone yet.”
Ed is a good provider — he’s a dentist — but he’s also a hearty, bad-joke-telling bore. I don’t know why Sylvia married him, but I invariably fail to see the appeal of my friends’ mates.
“Lately,” Sylvia says, “Ed’s been making Steve Sutherland look more and more attractive.”
“You call Mr. Sutherland by his first name now?”
She waits until a woman with a dog walks by us before she says, sotto voce, “I’m thinking of calling and asking him out for a drink or a coffee the next time Ed goes away to one of his conferences.”
“Why am I afraid you’re not joking?”
“Because I’m not. Ed is so — Why this weekend, he — I — Okay, listen to this: he insists on reading aloud to me from the Sunday newspaper when I’m trying to have my morning coffee. Twenty years we’ve been together, he knows I hate being read to, he knows I hate being talked to at all in the morning, and still he does it.”
“That would piss me off, too.” It would.
“Whereas Steve doesn’t seem to have a single unattractive trait. And he was pretty heavily coming on to me the other night at the dance.“
“So, you’d have coffee with Mr. Sutherland and then what?”
She flushes. “A little necking in a car might be nice, some making out. Don’t you think?”
In the four years since Henry left, I have tried not to think about necking, making out, or any other form of sexual contact, and have been fairly successful at suppressing and denying any urges of that nature. But why Sylvia, who already has a live-in sex provider, wants to tangle with someone else, I don’t understand.
She says, “For years now, I’ve thought I was happy enough with Ed, that his good points outweighed his bad, and I never thought about cheating. But now it’s like I’ve become enveloped in a cloud of fairy lust. All I can think about is how sexy Steve is, and what I’d like to do to him, in graphic detail.”
“Graphic detail that you’ll spare me, I hope.”
“You’re such a prude sometimes, Emily, honestly. But do you know what I mean? Has this ever happened to you?”
What did she call it? Fairy lust? How immature. “No, I can’t say that it has.” Not that I would admit, anyway.
I’m standing inside my door at 8:38 a.m., dressed and ready to go. I try not to tap my foot while I wait for Jesse to finish wandering around the house the way he does every morning, picking up his various items for school. If he were me, he would pack up the night before, but he’s not me.
“Have you got your phone and your wallet?” I ask this every morning. It’s part of our scripted routine. “And your lunch and your bus tickets?”
He says yeah and yeah, then, “Wait. Is it Thursday?”
“Yes, and can you please get going? I’m in a hurry.”
“It is Thursday? Fuck. Basketball tryouts are today after school.” He runs upstairs. “Do you know where my Jordans are? And my sports bag?”
I set down my briefcase, walk to the mudroom at the back of the house, and retrieve his basketball shoes and sports bag from the built-in cupboard designated for this purpose, the cupboard Jesse can never bring himself to use. I meet him in the front hall, where he throws a T-shirt, shorts, and his ankle brace into the bag, shrugs on his jacket, and says, “What? I’m ready. Are you?”
“Let’s just go.”
In the car, he says, “Where are you rushing off to this morning, anyway, that you’re so freaked out about the time? Going for a walk with Sylvia?”
I’m dressed in my business-type clothes and I have my briefcase. “Do I look like I’m going walking to you?”
“Forget it.” He turns on the car radio and switches the channel to his station.
“I’m teaching today,” I say, above the music. “In Leo Antonelli’s class. Remember, I did it last week?”
“Then where are your slides?”
“I packed them in the trunk earlier, when you were still asleep. After I read the newspaper and had my coffee and before I took my shower and made your lunch and breakfast.”
“Are you done talking now? Because I’d like to listen to this song.”
I want to ask him about the basketball tryouts — if this is the first or has he missed one, and when is the next, and what time should I expect him home, and is it the same coach as last year. I need to know if I should worry about this aspect of his life. But the moment isn’t right. And I can always interrogate him tonight, when he comes home for dinner, turns on the television to watch while he eats, and will be even less inclined to talk.
I pull up in front of the school at three minutes to the bell. Jesse opens the car door, shrugs on his knapsack, turns around, and looks in the back seat. “Oh shit,” he says, more sheepish than angry.
“What?”