Fortunate Son

9

Years after Thomas was gone from May and Elton’s home, Eric skipped the eleventh grade. He had done the core course work over the summer, spending the evenings with Christie. She got an apartment near the beach in Santa Monica, where he spent most afternoons doing his homework, surfing, and making love to her.

At first Drew called every day. He’d leave long, tearful messages asking Christie to come back East. She told him again and again that she couldn’t, that she needed time to think about things.

One day, while Eric waxed his surfboard on the couch across from her, Christie answered the phone, frowned, and said, “Oh, hi, Drew.”

He had called to tell her that he’d made the decision to come home midyear and go to UCLA.

“But you wanted to graduate from Yale,” she said.

“I want you.”

“I’ve met another man,” she said in a clear, emotionless voice. “And I love him.”

Eric could hear Drew crying.

“You can come back, but I’m with him now.”

She listened to him cry and tried to make him feel better. But there was no caring in her voice, no love left over for him.

When she hung up the phone, she said to Eric, “Come fuck me.”

Eric’s embarrassment for Drew, combined with his admiration for Christie’s brazen request, caused him to become very excited. They went at it so powerfully that Eric broke the condom when he came.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “I just finished my period yesterday.”

And so they made love again, and again, without protection.

Eric called Ahn and told her that he was spending the night in Santa Monica.

“Be careful,” Ahn told him.

Christie cried and then they made love. She laughed and they made love.

“I dropped him,” she said, surprised at her own resolve.

“You didn’t love him,” Eric explained.

“I do love him. I want to marry him. I want to go to school in the East and be with him every weekend.”

“Then why don’t you?” Eric asked.

“I tried, but I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

They were sitting side by side in Christie’s single bed. She’d been fired from her father’s company when he found out that she was spending all her time with a fifteen-year-old boy. Now she worked for a design agency that had offices in the Third Street Mall. Her father took back the company car and disowned her.

The rent was due, and she was a hundred dollars short. Eric could help her this month, but he wondered how long she could live like that.

“I can’t even be away from you for more than two days, Eric,” she said. “When you stay home on the weekends, sometimes I cry until you’re back again.”

“Because you miss me?” he asked.

“Because it hurts,” she said. “It hurts inside me. Sometimes I don’t even like you. I look at you and think how great my life was before we met. I even hate you for not caring about anything. And then you get up just to go to the toilet and I get scared that I might not ever see you again.”

Eric remembered the times when she came into the bathroom while he was taking a piss. She’d come up behind him, shivering against him, and hold his penis while he urinated.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

“Do you love me? Is that it?”

“It’s not that at all. I love Drew. Sometimes I think about him, how sweet he was trying to be tough, trying to be the best at everything. Sometimes when we’d get together, he’d tell me about how scared he was that he wouldn’t get into Yale or that he wouldn’t be able to make it from nothing like his father did. That’s when I loved him the most. I protected him.”

Eric realized that Christie was telling him something that he’d always suspected but never really knew because he found it so hard to understand. He still didn’t completely grasp what it was that people felt about him. But at least Christie opened the door.

“So you don’t love me?” he asked.

“It’s not about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The first time I saw you I wanted to get down on my knees,” the young woman said with anger and some fear in her voice. “It scared me, and I went home and took a bath. But that didn’t help. I went to my room and closed the door, and then I started thinking about dying.”

“Dying? Why?”

“That’s how you made me feel.” She was weeping now. “I knew that either I was going to call you or that I’d die.”

“Really die?”

“I don’t know. I think that I might have. But even if I didn’t there would have been something missing from the rest of my life. I tried not to call you. I put down the phone ten times before I dialed the number. But once I talked to you I couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t.”

“But you love Drew.”

“Every night when you go home I want to call him. I miss his jokes and his trying to show off. I used to help him rewrite his papers. I was better at school than he was.”

“Better than me too,” Eric said. He put a hand on her thigh, but she pulled away.

“But you don’t care. If I told you that I was going to Yale tomorrow you’d just say good-bye. You wouldn’t even miss me.”

Eric had missed Branwyn; he’d missed her terribly. And when Tommy left his heart hurt so bad that he still felt the pain. He had the capacity to feel loss.

“You see?” she said. “You won’t even lie to me.”

Eric would have missed her, but he wasn’t thinking about that. He was trying to understand what Christie was telling him. He felt that she was somehow the mouthpiece of a much greater force, some insubstantial being breaking through to the material world, to him.

“Do you love me, Eric?”

“Yes, I do,” he lied.

He said the words quickly, before he could consider them. This was an instinctual response. It was only later the next day, when he had time to think about it, that he realized why. Christie wasn’t responsible for what had happened between them. Neither was he for that matter. But their coming together brought out a need in her that she couldn’t control. Years later he would be able to see it coming, to recognize when women, and men, felt so drawn to him that they were willing to leave everything to see if maybe he could satisfy a yearning in their hearts. Then he would stop the attraction, avoid their lavish offers and intense praise. But with Christie he couldn’t say no. She offered him something that he needed, and so he told her that he loved her because it was the right thing to do.

“You do?”

“Yes. Yes, yes, yes,” and he kissed her. Holding her, he asked, “But what can we do about Drew?”

“That’s why I told him I was with someone,” she said. “Now he can find somebody else and we can be together.”

“But will you be happy with me?” Eric asked. “You love him.”

“But I need you.”

“Is that good?” Eric asked her. “I mean, it doesn’t sound like you’ll be happy with me.”

Instead of answering him she stroked his cock and bit his nipple through his thin T-shirt.

Eric kept seeing Christie even though they didn’t love each other. Her need and his guilt made a bond stronger than any consensual, reasonable, affectionate love.

But Eric also began seeing other girls at school. He’d call them up and ask them out, bring them to his house when no one was there, and have sex in Branwyn’s old room. Patricia Leonard and Kai Lin, Gina Maxim and Star Bennet and Vivian Bright, Estrella Alvarez and BobbiAnne Getz. Some of the girls had steady boyfriends, others did not. But they all gave in to his attentions — all of them, every one. And whenever Christie got wind of one of his affairs, she yelled and threw pots at him. But when he’d walk out the door, she’d always run after and grab on to him and not let go.

In the meanwhile Eric’s grades were perfect. He joined the California Junior Tennis League and won nearly every game. Colleges began to woo him.

“You have a charmed life,” Mrs. McCabe, the art teacher, told him one day after class.

She’d asked him to stay behind to talk to him about a drawing he’d done. It was supposed to be a self-portrait to be drawn at home on the previous weekend. All of the other students had drawn fairly realistic pictures of themselves. Most of these were of their faces; one or two included the rest of the body with some interesting clothes. Star Bennet had done a nude self-portrait, which she later gave to Eric.

But Eric’s attempt was different. His painting was him, face forward with his eyes hollow and his forehead a cave. In his left eye was a drawing of Branwyn’s profile, and in the right was a drawing of Thomas, as well as he could remember him. In the cave he’d rendered a scene of a man standing in a fire, with naked men and women dancing in a circle around him. The dancers moved in wild abandon. The man in the fire stood taller, head and shoulders above all the rest.

“What is this, Eric?” Mrs. McCabe asked.

“Me.”

“Who are these people in your eyes?”

“My mother and brother.”

“Why are they black?”

“Because they are.”

“And this tableau in your head?”

“The man in the fire is me,” he said. “The dancers are everybody else.”

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing,” the teenager replied.

“I find it hard to understand,” Mrs. McCabe said. “You’ve led a charmed life, but this painting makes you seem so unhappy.”

He awoke at three the next morning remembering the conversation. He had started the drawing in a straightforward fashion at first. It was just a sketch of his face. But as he looked at the eyes, he thought that they should be a reflection of what he saw. What was he looking at? Why, himself, of course. But then the idea of the mind’s eye came to him. In his mind he often visualized Branwyn and Tommy. After expanding and rendering his internal visions, Eric looked at the forehead as a kind of blank screen. What was going on in there? The image came quickly with little or no deliberation. He was being burned up by the love of the world; his eyes saw lost love, and his mind was hollow and on fire, like the first man set upon by Prometheus and his promise of wisdom.

The cell phone on his nightstand sighed a sad rag tune a moment after he opened his eyes. Eric wondered if it was his phone that had awakened him from his sleeping thought or if it was just a coincidence that it rang.

“Hello?” he said sleepily.

She tried to speak, but all she could do was sob and gasp.

“Christie?”

Again the unintelligible moaning and cries, with only a few words shot through.

“What is it, honey?”

“I, I, I didn’t want to call you,” she cried. “I didn’t. I wasn’t going to. Really, I wasn’t ever going to tell you.”

“What?”

“I, I can’t,” she said, and then the connection was broken.

In the dark of the room Eric wondered what to do. Should he call her back or just wait until morning? Should he tell her that she’d be better off with Drew, whom she loved and who both loved and needed her?

The cell phone moaned again.

“Hello.”

“I’m pregnant,” she said in a controlled voice. “I told the doctor that I’d only had unprotected sex a day after my period, and he said that sometimes healthy sperm lives on for a week or more waiting for ovulation.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me?” he asked, biding for time.

“I called Drew. I asked him what I should do.”

“What did he say?”

“He said to come out to Connecticut, that we could get married and he’d raise the baby as his.” She wailed then, crying so loudly that Eric had to hold the phone away from his ear.

It was nine months from Eric’s sixteenth birthday. He would graduate from high school before then. And he would soon be a father. The graduation, his child’s birth — he imagined both of these scenes in the hollow skull of his drawing.

“Eric?”

“Will your baby need you to love its father?” he asked.

“What?”

“A baby needs love, right?” Eric said. “He needs his mother to love him and his father, and he needs his mother and father to love each other.”

“I’ll die if you leave me, Eric.”

“Then why did you call Drew?”

“I’m scared,” she said. “I’m scared and that’s something you don’t understand. I can’t explain it to you because you’re never afraid. Drew understands because he always is.”

Eric realized that the emotion he felt the most often with Christie was shame. He was ashamed because she was like a used textbook for him, something to learn from but not to keep. She studied him so closely that she saw things in him that he never considered. And she shared her knowledge without holding back. She was selfless and transparent, almost invisible to him.

Like air, he thought.

“What are you afraid of?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she moaned. “Having a baby with no money and no husband. Loving Drew and needing you so deep inside. Do you want me to give the baby up?”

“For adoption?”

“Abortion.”

Eric remembered what Branwyn had said about Elton, Tommy’s father: Elton had the choice to be with me or not and Tommy didn’t. I couldn’t ask Tommy if he minded if I didn’t have him and if he didn’t have a life to live. No sunshine or sandy beaches. Tommy didn’t even know what a sandy beach was.

“No,” Eric said. “You shouldn’t do that. I mean, the baby needs a life, and Drew wants to love both you and the baby.”

“What about you?” Christie asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I want to have this baby with you,” she said.

“Then we’ll have our baby and raise him to be a man.”

“Or a woman,” Christie added. Her voice was now bright and filled with hope.

Eric wondered what Drew would think when he realized that he was the backup just in case Eric said no.

“Go to sleep, Christie,” Eric said. “I’ll come over in the morning.”

“When?”

“At nine.”

“What about school?”

“I’ll skip it for one day. We can go to the doctor together. And talk about having our baby.”

“I love you,” she said.

“And I love both of you.”

By that time Minas Nolan was leaving for work at ten to seven every morning. He rarely made it home before eleven. He was sleeping four hours a night and did not take vacations or even weekends off. The only time that he and Eric saw each other was between six and ten to seven, when they’d have breakfast together and share the New York Times. It was a day-old paper, but they didn’t mind. Reading together was their ritual; the news had little to do with it.

Ahn would also get up to make and serve their breakfast. Minas had rye toast and marmalade with a poached egg and air-dried German beef. Eric had oatmeal with toasted almonds, golden raisins, brown sugar, and cream. Most of their time together was spent eating and reading. Now and then Minas would mention something he found fascinating in the paper or an anecdote from the previous day at work. Eric, for his part, listened or, at most, asked for clarification on a detail or a word. He never tried to have a full-blown conversation because when the clock on the wall said 6:50, Minas Nolan stood up, bussed his dishes, took his briefcase from the floor next to the door, and left no matter what was happening at breakfast or in the world according to the Times.

But that day was different.

Eric couldn’t go back to sleep after his talk with Christie. He restrung his fiberglass tennis racket in the garage and then looked over his school papers. Eric was an excellent student. His comprehension of math was pure and intuitional; his memory for facts was a point of pride for his teachers. He didn’t need to check his work, but he had to do something.

“Did you love my mother?” Eric asked Minas at six forty-two.

“Of course I did,” Minas replied. The once-handsome man was now graying and haggard. “I loved her very much.”

“What about Mama Branwyn?”

Minas’s throat constricted, and his mind traveled back to the night she asked him for a kiss. He folded his newspaper, reached to place it on the table, but he wasn’t looking and so dropped the Times to the floor.

“Branwyn,” he said.

They had not discussed the mother of Eric’s heart since before the day Eric found that green fish on the beach at Malibu.

Eric placed his hands palms down on the table. All of the manliness and beauty that was once his father’s had now been absorbed into the boy’s features.

Ahn walked in with their final cup of tea. She could see the confrontation in their eyes, so she silently placed the solid silver platter between them and then left to eavesdrop from the pantry.

“Branwyn,” Dr. Nolan said again. “Yes... yes, I loved her very, very much. She saved me when your mother died.”

“Did she love you, Dad?”

“I... I don’t think she loved me the way I loved her,” he said. “But that didn’t ever seem to matter. The way Branwyn felt about people, she could give everything inside her to you even if you weren’t her first choice or even somebody she could love.”

“Were we people she loved?” Eric asked. He’d forgotten about Christie by then.

“I think so,” his father said. “It wasn’t hard with Branwyn like it was with other women.”

“What do you mean?” Eric asked softly.

“Other women I’d known wanted something you couldn’t see or touch or even say. They called it love, but it was more like a game the way I saw it. One night I asked Branwyn if she loved me, and she said that she fell in love with me every night that I carried her up the stairs to our room. When she said that, I felt like a kid. I kissed her and she laughed at me...” Minas got lost in the memory.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I asked her to marry me, but she said no. I asked her all the time, but the answer was always the same.”

“You think that was because she didn’t love you?”

“No. It had to do with Tommy,” Minas said. “Tommy’s father was alive, and she didn’t want her boy to feel his loss with our marriage.”

It was time for Minas to leave.

“Have I neglected you, Eric?”

In his mind Eric saw his father rising up and walking toward the door. He was supposed to be leaving, but he was not.

Behind the pantry door Ahn was thinking the same thing. She feared that something terrible was about to happen.

“No,” Eric said.

“It’s just that,” Minas continued as if his son had not spoken at all, “you’ve never seemed to need help. All we ever had to do was contain you, hold you back from eating all the Christmas fruitcake or from jumping off the roof to fly with the sparrows.

“You never complained about anything. If I told you something, you just listened to me. Children are supposed to fight with their parents. Sons are supposed to want to push their fathers aside. But I always felt that you were trying to protect me instead of the other way around.

“But now that you’re asking about your mothers, I see that I haven’t been there for you.”

Eric was staring at his father’s face, imagining that he had his sketch pad before him. He would paint the portrait of his father many years later, but this was the sitting for that canvas. The drained blue eyes and graying blond hair, the gaunt jowls and dry lips.

Mothers, Eric thought. Mothers. Other children only had one mother, but he had two and both of them had died for him to survive.

“Would you like to go down to Malibu this morning, son?” Minas asked.

“I have to do something, Dad.”

“What’s that?”

“Christie’s going to the doctor. I told her that I’d go with.”

“You’re still with her?”

Eric had seen Christie almost every day for a year. “Yeah, Dad.”

It was 7:05, and Minas dawdled at the table.

“I could come home early,” the doctor offered.

“Sure, Dad.”

Ahn came out of the storeroom moments after Minas left. She stood near the door staring at Eric.

“Hi, Ahn,” the young man said.

She came up to the table and sat in the doctor’s chair.

Ahn was the only person that Eric had ever been afraid of. It was long ago that he’d first felt this fear, before he was twelve and after Thomas had been taken away. He would find Ahn standing somewhere, staring at him. When he’d ask her why, she wouldn’t say anything, just wander away only to return later, still staring silently.

“The only thing I remember,” she began, “before I ran to the refugee camp, was a story that a very old man said to me. I don’t know who he was. Maybe my grandfather, maybe some elder in the village where we work in rice paddies.

“He told me the story about a young woman who fell in love with a tiger. The woman go to her mother and tell her that she is in love with the tiger that lived in the north jungle.

“At night he calls outside my window and asks me to come away with him, the girl said. And when I look out I see him in moonlight. Mother, he is so beautiful and handsome, and his deep voice makes me tremble inside.

“But, my daughter, the mother said. He is a tiger, a man-eater, a monster.

“For you, Mother, I know that he is a beast. But for me he has nothing but love. He takes me riding on his back through the jungle under golden moonlight, and all the creatures there bow down to me as consort to their king.

“It is true, the mother said, that the tiger is a king. He is better than any man you would find in our poor village. But he is still a tiger, something apart. And even if he believes that he loves you, sooner or later you will answer to his claws.

“The girl said nothing more to her mother about her love. That night she disappeared from the house of her parents, taking with her a yellow robe that many generations of her family’s women had worn on their wedding day. Three years passed and nothing was heard about the girl until one morning an infant boy was found in the middle of the village swaddled in a bloody yellow cloth. A beautiful boy with tiger’s eyes and a roar instead of crying. The grandmother took in the child, and he became a great king. But he was always heartbroken and sad because he had no true mother or any father at all.

“And one day, while he was on a crusade to unite all his people, he was beset by a tiger. His retainers mortally wounded the beast, but before the tiger died the young king looked deeply into his eyes. There he saw the truth: that his father, the tiger, had devoured his mother, but she lived on inside of him. The boy had found both his mother and his father, but in finding them they were slain.”

Ahn stood up and walked from the room. Eric felt the warning in her words. He even understood the general meaning of the tale. But he didn’t know what role she saw him in. Was he the tiger or the boy? Was Christie the village girl? Was Ahn the powerless mother? He sat there for over an hour considering the parable. He went over it again and again.

He imagined the stately tiger walking through the jungle with the golden apparition of the village girl astride his back. In his jaws the tiger carried a bloodied yellow cloth in which the royal baby was wrapped. The image made his breath come fast. It was beautiful and very sad.

“The tiger and the village girl had no choice,” Eric declared to an empty kitchen. “They were meant to be. And the boy, the boy can’t help himself either. They’re all just waiting for their parts to play.”

He took the bus down to Santa Monica, seeing himself as a pawn and satisfied to release himself to fate.