Perhaps Paul’s mother thought she could keep his father alive by telling his favorite lies for him. Paul knew better, but the story wasn’t for him anymore.
“Well, I would never have known,” said Julian. Paul saw something perilous behind his schoolboy manners—an interest, genuine and eager, in the details of Paul’s life that he was still holding back.
“It’s just hard.” Paul’s mother, as always, was unwilling to stop talking about his father once she’d started. She sat with her elbows on her knees, cradling her empty cup like a fallen bird. “You get used to things being a certain way, and then when they aren’t—”
“Ma,” Paul cut in, “it’s fine.”
She looked as if he had struck her. The silence that fell was ugly.
Julian’s hand grazed Paul’s shoulder; the touch didn’t last long enough for Paul to decide if it was meant to be reassuring. At his other side, Laurie was taut as a slingshot. She was playing joylessly with the cat, teasing it with an ostrich feather that had come free from the duster.
“I really ought to get better at cooking,” Julian said, brisk and bright, as if he weren’t taking control of the conversation. “Dining halls foment learned helplessness, I can barely boil an egg . . .”
The air no longer felt so thick. Laurie eventually let the cat run off with the feather and settled back into her seat, less irritable now than merely bored.
Paul’s mother didn’t seem to notice any false notes in Julian’s earnestness. Julian soon had her promising to teach him the basics of cooking, and assuring him that he was welcome to drop by whenever he wanted a hot meal. Julian handled her magnificently—flattering her without appearing to do it deliberately, steering her gently toward safer topics when she drifted too close again to the subject of Paul’s father. Paul watched the process with distant fascination, not unlike what he had felt during his fetal pig dissection in high school. This is being nice, he thought. This is what she wishes you were like.
Watching Julian’s performance, Paul realized he had been wrong all along to imagine his family wanted him to metamorphose into something softer and kinder and more docile. It was much simpler than that. All they actually wanted him to do was lie.
Audrey was home, but she was in and out of the living room, and showed few signs of interest even when she was present. At their mother’s behest, she was washing a load of towels; once that task was complete, she had to get herself properly counterculture-looking before her shift at the record store. She only settled down toward the end of the visit, sitting in the chair by the window in her overcoat and boots. Paul thought he could feel her listening, and could even imagine the face she was wearing, but whenever he looked at her she appeared absorbed in her magazine.
“I hope you know I meant it, about being welcome at dinner,” his mother said to Julian as he and Paul gathered their coats. “What are you boys going to be up to tonight?”
Julian answered before Paul could speak. “I don’t know—get a soda, probably, maybe go bowling. Or see if anyone’s still playing The Godfather, it’s a crime Paul hasn’t seen it yet.”
He said it so casually that at first Paul doubted his own memory. Somehow it was easier to believe he’d forgotten an entire conversation than to accept that none of it was true. He couldn’t fathom why Julian would have lied, but the sheer pointlessness of it convinced him all the more that it had been deliberate.
As they were leaving, Paul heard his mother and Audrey in the front hallway, speaking as if they didn’t think he would overhear.
“He seems like a sweet boy.”
“Yeah,” said Audrey. There was a smile in her voice, but an arch one. “‘Seems.’ That kid’s trouble.”
He didn’t linger. He followed Julian into the snowy streets, sprinting to catch up. Julian didn’t stop walking as he lit himself a cigarette. For a moment he left the match lit, and he brushed his fingertips over the flame, one after the other, just quickly enough not to burn. Then he shook the match cold and flicked it into the gutter.
Julian’s hands were bare despite the chill, but he was wearing a new scarf, courtesy of a care package from his mother—camel-colored, some kind of exotic wool, softer than anything Paul had ever touched.
“I like them just fine,” he said, looking sideways at Paul with one of his sly, tilted smiles. “I don’t know what you were so worried about.”
Julian smoked in shallow inhales, holding the smoke in his mouth rather than drawing it into his lungs. Paul suspected it was a relatively new affectation for him, one he hadn’t yet learned to enjoy—but he’d already mastered the aesthetics of it, holding the cigarette between his fingers with the practiced, languorous grace of a film star.
“Listen—why did you lie?”
Julian raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. “When?”
“When you said we were going bowling or something instead of to the museum.”
“Oh.” Julian was unabashed. He shrugged and drew another mouthful from the cigarette. “I thought that sounded more likely, I suppose—more what she’d expect to hear. Going to the art museum sounds like a cover story, or else it just sounds queer. I thought you would prefer for me to lie.”
For a long while Paul couldn’t speak. Julian finished his cigarette at the bus stop, leaning against the signpost in the dimming gray-blue light.
“So are you going to sulk all afternoon?” he asked suddenly as their bus drew near. “It’s so goddamn boring when you wallow in self-pity.”
The snap of cruelty didn’t surprise him. He’d been expecting it all along. Everything about Julian was shaded with the threat of it—even his affection felt dangerous, as if it might curdle at any moment into derision.
“I’m not here for your entertainment.”
When Julian grinned, Paul felt as if he’d passed a test he didn’t know he was taking.
“So I gathered.” Although he was smiling, there was an edge to his voice. “Still—try and make an effort. We’ll both be happier if I can find you as fascinating as you ought to be.”
Paul was almost relieved to feel the sting. It meant Julian saw every weakness in him and still thought he was worth the effort of hurting.
5.
Most nights the fifth chair in the dining room still sat empty. But even in its emptiness there was an absence occupying it that belonged there. Paul wished it would speak, in that soft-hard High German lilt that sounded almost nothing like his great-grandmother’s Yiddish accent. Paul still wanted to tuck in his right elbow to make way for a sweeping gesture that would never come, to grimace at a pun, roll his eyes at a prolonged explanation of a request to which he’d already assented. He wanted the silence to press hard enough that Audrey would remember how to argue with it, to throw down her fork and scream “You’re impossible” while their mother—always the more decisive disciplinarian—pointed sharply at the basement door. Paul wanted to feel the quiet at his side, to wait, keep waiting. He wanted to hate it for giving him nothing.
But two nights a week now the absence receded, replaced by an eager and chatty version of Julian, whose features were the only recognizable thing about him. Paul’s family hurried to make a place for him, the way people always did. His family had so many spaces to fill—some they’d spent the last year trying to ignore, others that had been there so long no one but Paul seemed to see them at all. Julian found each one in turn, and Paul’s family gave him little chance to hold anything back.