“No, it doesn’t.” The protest sounded more emphatic than he’d planned. “Beautiful things are supposed to hurt. It’s what I was saying earlier—even if you don’t know how you’re going to create something that matters, you can still want to do it so badly you can barely think about anything else—”
Paul thought, for a moment, that Julian was reaching across the table to take his hand. Then Julian retrieved the black queen, and Paul understood in a rush how foolish he was being, how little sense the gesture would have made. They weren’t children. Perhaps that would have to be another self-improvement project for the journal—observing how grown men spoke and behaved around each other so that he could mimic it more effectively.
“People tell you you’re ‘shy’ all the time, don’t they?” said Julian. He watched Paul’s face with a slight frown, as if he were listening to a familiar tune in an unusual key. “And then they act like you’re crazy when you do speak up, just to drive the point home that being shy is safer?”
Paul didn’t reply, at least not aloud, but Julian knew the answer already. He swept the board clear and smiled.
“Don’t listen to them. The rest of the world might not be ready for you, but I don’t know how I ever got on without you. You play white,” he added. “I want to see how you think when you have to move first.”
Paul could tell he was blushing, and Julian made it known, wordlessly, that he had noticed and would take it for what it was. This often happened between them now, the silent transmission of recognition and acceptance. Paul thought that Julian must see some immense potential in him, an early glimmer of all he hoped to become. It was the only way he could make sense of Julian’s willingness to forgive him.
4.
“So honey, when do we get to meet your new friend?”
Paul instantly wished he hadn’t dawdled so long at the breakfast table. He could tell from Audrey’s reaction that this wasn’t the first she’d heard of the subject. She sighed as if trying to hide her annoyance and took a purposeful swig from her orange juice.
“Which friend?” he said.
It wasn’t convincing, and neither his mother nor his sisters did him the courtesy of pretending it was. His mother smiled at him obligingly and ignored the question altogether.
“Mrs. Koenig,” she said, “mentioned you have a friend who comes by sometimes. She says she doesn’t think he’s from the neighborhood.”
“Mrs. Koenig is hoping he’s a drug dealer,” Audrey muttered into her glass. “Smug buttinsky.”
“She said he looked perfectly nice, very clean-cut.” His mother fired Audrey a quick warning glance. “Weren’t you ever going to say something? Why would you keep that a secret?”
He should have seen this coming—he’d known the boundary would have to be breached eventually, because they always were. But anger still plumed through him, and his chest felt so tight that for a moment he couldn’t speak.
“It isn’t a secret.” He squared his shoulders and glared down at the lukewarm, rubbery scrambled eggs he’d spent the last half hour cutting into pebbles. “It’s—there’s nothing untoward about wanting to conduct my own social life without keeping you apprised of every detail.”
“That’s college for ‘mind your business,’ Ma,” said Audrey.
“But it’s not a detail,” his mother protested, “it’s an entire person. I just don’t know why I haven’t even heard you mention a name.”
“You don’t keep an inventory of all Audrey or Laurie’s friends, so I don’t see why—”
His mother wrung her hands and gave him another smile, this one much more strained.
“All I’m saying is that it’s a big change for you. I’d have thought you’d say something. I hope,” she added, as if it were an afterthought instead of the main thrust behind the line of questioning, “that it’s not because you’re ashamed to introduce us to your college friends.”
Of course this left Paul little choice but to surrender. He harbored a vain hope that Julian would reject the invitation, and it felt like a deliberate jab in the ribs when he didn’t. That weekend, inevitably, Julian arrived at the house for lunch with a box of pistachio candies and a bundle of hothouse sunflowers. He was late—fashionably, he would have claimed—and slightly overdressed in the now-familiar way that made him seem like a character in an English novel. When he took off his overcoat, Paul caught the scarlet flash of a carnation pinned to his lapel.
Paul was only ashamed because his mother had suggested he might be. The house felt smaller and dirtier now—sun-faded curtains, cheap detergent smells, a year’s patina of soot and grease on the outside of the windows. As if through a stranger’s ears he heard the small blemishes in his mother’s grammar, and the way her working-class accent, much thicker than his own, made every vowel as blunt and flat as a woodchip.
As they were all sitting in the living room, drinking Folgers out of the good peach-blossom cups, Paul had trouble ignoring the photograph of his father on the mantelpiece. Jake Fleischer had never learned to smile like an American—there was too much tooth to it, or else they were the wrong sort of teeth, functional rather than ornamental. The picture had been taken at his father’s twenty-year anniversary at the department. He was wearing his dress blues, and he held his checker-banded cap in one gloved hand as if he were gesturing with it. The pictures had come back from the printer three months later, when the remnants of the family were still surviving on sympathy casseroles and Chinese takeout.
In an empty house, when he and Julian were caught up in conversation about immense abstract ideas, it had been possible to ignore the void left in his father’s wake. Surrounded by the rest of his family, though, Paul could no longer pretend the elision was an accident. Since his death his father’s absence had spilled far past the carefully drawn outlines his father had occupied when he was alive. It had flowed into every available space and settled there, and there was no chance Julian hadn’t noticed it. Paul had no idea, watching him, how he was managing to think about anything else.
“No, it’s all lovely, Mrs. Fleischer,” Julian was saying. He had been similarly effusive about the beet soup and white-bread sandwiches his mother cobbled together for lunch. Paul knew Julian was just trying to get her to stop making a spectacle of her self-disgust, but something about the politeness irritated him. Julian’s kindness toward his mother felt so deservedly patronizing that Paul was embarrassed for her—and even for Julian, a little, for deigning to give her what she clearly yearned for.
“Paul’s father always took care of most of the cooking,” his mother said, still apologetic and anxious. She nudged the cookie tin across the coffee table as she spoke. “He came from a restaurant family, he had a real gift for it.”
That was one of his parents’ old lies. It was strange that she would resurrect it now, for the sake of this stranger who could never guess what it was supposed to hide. It had been a nice story until Paul thought to do the math. He’d known for years now that the war began when his father was still young, and the bohemian café in Berlin was lost long before his father was tall enough to reach the counter. In his father’s stories the family restaurant stood on its own power, moving like clockwork, unaided by human hands. There were only the patrons, with their raucous conversations and pipe-smoke smells. There was winter-squash stew bubbling on the stove, its steam glazing the kitchen windows. There was bitter, soft rye bread and the sweet aroma of cinnamon coffee cakes. The woman who lifted them from the oven was such a deliberate afterthought that Paul never learned her name.