Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

The Eleventh Floor

CAREFULLY DRUNK, Mr. Bradbury sat on his patio-balcony in the bland morning sunshine, sipping vodka-and-something. He was waiting for his son to visit. This son, Eric, had called and said he would arrive shortly, and that was an hour ago. It was Saturday: vodka day. He peered down from the eleventh floor at the sidewalk trees, where the sparrows were making a racket. Below the sparrows, Mr. Bradbury could see the velvet-brown dot of the doorman’s hat. He thought he could smell crab-apple blossoms and something more subtle, like dust.

In shivering glassy clarity, he observed a rusting blue subcompact move into a space in front of a fireplug. That would be Eric, who had a collection of parking tickets, little marks of risk and daring. Watching him lock his car, his father mashed out his cigarette in a blue pottery ashtray balanced on the balcony railing. He coughed, putting his hand in front of his mouth. Eric had stopped to talk to the doorman, George. George and Eric, two human dots. Eric’s pinpoint face turned, tilted, and stared up at the rows of balconies, finding his father on the eleventh. He did not wave.

Standing up, Mr. Bradbury tested his reflexes. He bent his knees and thought of a line from Byron: “From the dull palace to the dirty hovel, something something something novel.” The problem with poetry was that you were always having to look it up. He couldn’t recall which poem contained the dull palace, nor did he care. He stepped out of the sunlight into the living room and sank into the sofa, trying not to groan. Elena, the Peruvian housekeeper, was preparing lunch, probably one of her crude ethnic casseroles. She didn’t inform him of her plans in advance. He reached over to the coffee table and pressed the MUTE button on the remote control to silence the CNN announcer. His neck hurt. He rubbed it, and to his own fingers the skin felt scaly. At least no swellings or lumps. He let his right arm drop down onto the side table. His thumb landed in the engraved silver scallop-shell ashtray and emerged from it with a gray coating of ash. He bent over and was rubbing the thumb on the carpet just as his son knocked.

The boy had a key; the knock was some kind of ritual announcement of estrangement. He heaved himself up to his feet and, remembering to stand straight, made his way past the bookshelves and the paintings to the foyer.

“Eric,” he said, opening the door and seeing his son in a blast of sentimental pride. “I’m glad you came.” The flaring of his love made him shy, so that he drew back his body even as he extended his hand. Eric shook his hand, gazed down at his father’s face with an examining look, and sniffed twice. Mr. Bradbury could tell that Eric was trying to catch the scent of his breath. “Come in, come in,” he said. “Don’t loiter out there in the hall. Why didn’t you just let yourself in with your key?”

“I lost it,” Eric said. “I lost all my keys.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. A party. Yeah, that’s right. A party.”

Eric stood in the center of the living room, checking out the familial furniture. Then he tossed his jacket on a chair and bent down to unlace his shoes. For some reason his father noticed that his son was wearing thick white cotton socks. Then Eric straightened up, pleased to be on display, his thumbs hooked in the back pockets of his jeans.

“You’re getting sizable. Is it the swimming?”

“Not this season,” Eric said. “It’s track. They had us on a training program.”

“I always forget what a big kid you are. I don’t remember anyone in the family being your size except your mother’s uncle Gus, who worked in the Water Department. He had the worst halitosis I’ve ever encountered in an adult human being. Your mother used to say that he smelled like a Labrador with stomach lesions.” He smiled as his son walked toward the open porch door and the balcony. It was an athletic, pantherish walk. “You let your hair grow,” his father said. “You have a beard. You look like a Renaissance aide-de-camp.”

Eric reached over for the ashtray on the railing and fastidiously put it down on the deck. Without turning around, he said, “I thought I’d try it out.” Mr. Bradbury saw him glance at his drink, measuring it, counting the ice cubes.

“Try what? Oh. The beard. You should. Absolutely.”

Eric lifted himself easily and sat on the railing, facing his father. He hooked his feet around the bars. He squinted toward the living room, where his father stood. “Did it surprise you?”

“What?” The beard: he meant the beard. “Oh, a bit, maybe. But I’m in a state of virtually constant surprise. George surprises me with tales of his riotous family, you surprise me with your sudden visits, and Elena out there in the kitchen surprises me every time she manages to serve me a meal. Your old dad lives in a state of paralyzed amazement. So. How’s college life? You’ve been kind of short on the letters.”

“It’s only across town, Dad.”

“I know how far away it is. You could call. You could put your finger on the old rugged dial.”

“I forget. And so do you.” Eric put his arms out and leaned his head back to catch the rays of the sun. If he fell, he’d fall eleven floors.

“In that sunlight,” his father said, “your skin looks shellacked.”

Eric eyed his father, then the patio deck, where the glass of vodka and fruit juice made a small festive group with the ashtray, a lighter, and an FM transistor radio. “Shellacked?”

Mr. Bradbury put his hands in his pockets. He took three steps forward. “I only meant that you look like you’ve already had some sun this year. That’s all I meant.” He laughed, one rushed chuckle. “I will not have my vocabulary questioned.” He stepped onto the balcony and sat down in a canvas chair, next to the drink and the cigarettes. “Do you ever write your sister?”

“I call her. She’s okay. She asks about you. Your health and things like that.” Mr. Bradbury was shading his eyes. “How’s your breathing?”

“My breathing?” Mr. Bradbury took his hand away from his eyes. “Fine. Why do you ask?”

“It seems sort of shallow or something.”

“You were never much for tact, were you, kid?” His father leaned back. “I don’t have emphysema yet, if that’s the question. But I still smoke. Oh, yes.” He smiled oddly. “Cigarettes,” he said, “are my friends. They have the faith.”

Eric hopped down, so that he was no longer looking at his father, and turned to survey the city park two blocks west. “How’s business?”

His father waved his hand in a gesture that wasn’t meant to express anything. “Good. Business is good. I’m doing commercials for a bank owned by a cartel of international slime, and I also have a breakfast-food account now, aimed at kids. Crispy Snax. The demographics are a challenge. We’re using animated cartoons and we’ve invented this character, Colonel Crisp, who orders the kids to eat the cereal. He raises a sword and the product appears in a sort of animated blizzard of sugar. We’re going for the Napoleonic touch. It’s coercive, of course, but it’s funny if you’re positioned behind the joke instead of in front of it. We’re getting angry letters from mothers. We must be doing something right.” He stared at his son’s back. “Of course, I get tired sometimes.”

“Tired?”

He waited, then said, “I don’t know. I should take a vacation.” He looked past his son at the other buildings across the street with their floors of patio-balconies, some with hanging plants, others with bicycles. “So I could recollect sensations sweet in hours of weariness ’mid the din of towns and cities. Listen, you want a drink? You know where it is.”

Eric turned and stared at his father. “Eleven thirty in the morning?” He lifted himself on the railing again.

Mr. Bradbury shrugged. “It’s all right. It’s Saturday. It warms up the mental permafrost. On weekends it’s okay to drink before lunch. I’ve got a book here that says so.”

“You wrote that book, Pop.”

“Well, maybe I did.” He sat up. “Damn it, stop worrying about me. I don’t worry about you. You’re too young to be worrying about me, and besides, I’m making out like a bandit.”

Eric said nothing. He was looking away from his father into the living room, at a Lichtenstein print above the sofa. It showed a comic-book woman passionately kissing a comic-book man.

“You won’t mind if I do?”

“What?” Eric said. “Have a drink? No, I won’t mind.”

Mr. Bradbury stood up and walked to the kitchen, remembering to aim himself and to keep his shoulders thrown back. “Your semester must be about done,” he said, his voice raised above the sound of ice cubes clattering out of the tray. “How much longer?”

“Two weeks.”

“You taking that lifeguarding job again this summer?”

“That’s part of what I came to talk to you about.”

“Oh.” In a moment he returned with what was identifiably a screwdriver. “Cheers,” he said, raising it. “I knew there must be some reason.” He settled down into the chair, reached over for the ashtray and lighter, and lit a cigarette. “How’s your love life? How’s the bad Penny?”

“Penny and I split.”

“You and Penny split up? I wasn’t informed.” He took a sip of the drink, inhaled from the cigarette, then laughed. Smoke came out his mouth as he did. “I’m going to miss that girl, wandering around here in her flower-pattern pajamas, her little feet sinking into the carpet, and asking me in broken French my opinions of Proust. ‘Monsieur Bradbury, aimez-vous Proust?’ ‘Oh, oui, Penny. Proust, c’est un écrivain très diligent.’ ” He waited, but his son didn’t smile. “Was she an inattentive lover?”

“Jesus Christ, Dad.” Eric picked at something beneath the hair on his right forearm. “You can’t ask about that.”

“Sure I can. You asked about my breathing. So what was the problem? Wasn’t she assiduous enough for you?”

“Assiduous?” Eric thought for a moment. “Yeah, yeah. She was assiduous enough. She was good in bed. Is that what you want to know? She was fine. That’s not why we split.”

Eric’s father was brushing the top of his head with the palm of his hand. “You know, Eric, I envy you. I suffer from Glückschmerz: the envy we feel upon hearing of the good fortune of others.”

Eric nodded. “I know it, Pop.” He jumped down from the railing a second time and sat next to his father, so that they would both be looking at the building across the street and the rest of the city’s skyline, not at each other. “I have this other girl now. I think I love her.”

Mr. Bradbury watched an airplane off in the distance and began to hum “In a Sentimental Mood.”

“Did you hear me? I said I was in love.”

“I heard you.” He took another sip of his drink and then reached for the cigarette. “Sure, I heard you. I’ve been hearing about all the women you’ve fallen in love with since you were sixteen. No, fifteen. Almost six years now. That’s the price I pay for an amorous son. What’s her name this time?”

“Lorraine.”

“Lorraine.” He smiled. “Ah, sweet Lorraine. The Cross of Lorraine. Alsace-Lorraine. You two aren’t married, are you?”

“No, we aren’t married. Why?”

“To what,” his father asked, “do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“Oh, come on, Pop.” Mr. Bradbury felt his son’s hand on his knee. The gesture made him feel ninety-two years old. “It’s not that. I’m going to be asking you for money.”

“Oh, and when will that be?”

“In about thirty minutes.” His son waited. “It’d be impolite to ask before that.”

“You do know how to close a deal. Wait until the old man is in his cups. So it’s not bad news after all.”

“No, Dad, it’s not bad news. It’s—”

He stopped when Elena called them to the table. It was not an ethnic casserole. She’d prepared ham with salad and asparagus in hollandaise sauce. Eric’s father carried his drink and his cigarettes over to the table and placed them carefully next to his engraved silver napkin ring. “Putting on the ritz for you here today,” he said. “Isn’t Elena a swell woman?” he asked loudly, so that she’d hear. “You’ll love this meal!” he almost shouted.

“Cut out the shit, Pop,” Eric said, whispering. “I can’t stand it.”

“Okeydoke.” He sat back and with one eye shut examined the wine bottle Elena had put on the table. “Château Smith, ’69. An obscure California wine, heh heh. I think you’ll like it.” He swallowed part of his drink, put the glass aside, then picked up his fork and pushed a slice of ham around on the plate. “So. What’s the money for? I thought you had some money. I hope to God you aren’t one of these young goddamn entrepreneurs. I’d hate that.” He took a bite. “I wouldn’t join the bourgeois circus a minute before I had to.”

“I’m not. This is for getting away.”

“Getting away from what?” He chewed. “There’s no getting away from anything.”

“Yes, there is. I want to live up north in the woods near Ely for a year.”

“You want to do what?” Eric’s father put down his fork and stared at his son, an astonished smile breaking across his face. “I don’t believe it. Is that what you came here to tell me? You want to go off into the woods and live like a rustic?” He threw back his head and laughed. “Oh my God,” he said. “Rousseau lives.” He sat chuckling, then turned to Eric again. “Let me guess. You want to discover yourself. You want to discover who you are. You and this Lorraine have been having deep sinister whispered talks far into the night, and she thinks you need to find your authentic blah blah blah blah blah. Am I right so far?”

Eric scowled at his father, holding himself silent. His big hands fidgeted with the silverware. Then he said, “Lorraine just suggested it. What I want is to get away from college and the city … and this.” He swept his hand to indicate his father’s dinner table, apartment, and the view outside the eleventh floor. “Lorraine’s family has a cabin up north, and I want to live there this winter and work close by, if I can find a job. That’s what I want for a year.” He was staring intently at his fork.

“I see. You don’t want to end up middle-aged and red-eyed.”

Eric pretended not to hear. “Lorraine’s staying down here in the city. Her family’s letting me use their place. It’s for myself.”

Eric’s father took his lower lip in his teeth as he smiled. Then he said, “I didn’t think your generation indulged in such hefty idealism. I thought they were all designing computers and snorting the profits gram by gram. But this, a rustication, living in cabins and searching the soul, why, it’s positively Russian. With that beard, you even look slightly Russian. Who’ve you been reading, Thoreausky?”

“I’ve read Thoreau,” Eric said, looking out the window.

“I bet you have,” his father said. “Look, kid, I’m very pleased. No kidding. Just make one promise. While you’re up there, read some Chekhov. If you’re going to be a Russian, that’s the kind of Russian to be. Skip the other claptrap. You promise?”

“Sure. If you want me to.”

“Yup,” his father said. “I do.” He paused. His arms and shoulders ached. Every time he ate, he felt a hard lump in his stomach. He furtively touched his neck, then glanced at Eric, shoveling in the food, and said, “If your mother were still alive, I’d be getting all riled up and telling you to get settled down and finish your studies and all that sort of thing. Mothers don’t like it when their sons go off sulking into the woods. She’d’ve been worried. But you can handle yourself. And frankly I think it’s a great idea.” He leaned back. “ ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ ” he said. “Keats. I once used it in an ad for the Wisconsin State Board of Tourism. It’s the wrong season, but the thought’s right. Go north before you get tired.”

“Tired?”

Mr. Bradbury wiped his mouth with his napkin and stared vaguely at the television set next to the sideboard. It, too, was tuned to CNN. He could no longer resist alcoholic gloom. “You’ll get tired someday,” he said. “Like a damaged mainspring. You’ll get home at night and stand in front of the window as the sun sets. You’ll always know what time it is without looking at your watch. You’ll see odd mists you can’t identify coming up from the pond in the park. There’s a pattern in those mists, but you won’t find it. Then the fraud police knock on your door. Those bastards won’t leave a man alone.”

“Pop, you drink too much.”

Mr. Bradbury’s face reddened. “If we weren’t pals,” he said, “I’d sock you in the nose. Listen, kid. When I’m sober I don’t mortify people with the known facts of life. But you’re family.” He rose from the table and walked unsteadily across the thick carpeting of the living room. In five minutes he returned, carrying a check and waving it in the air as if to dry the ink. “A huge sum,” he said. “The damaged fruits of a sedentary life. If you don’t find work right away, you can read and bum around in the woods with the other unemployed animals on the dole. If you do find a job, which I doubt, since it’s a depressed area, you can refund the unused portion. Someday you can pay this back. That’s the convention between fathers and sons.”

“I’ll try to come down at Christmas.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice.” Mr. Bradbury cut a spear of his asparagus into small pieces and worried the tip with his fork. The check was in the middle of the table, and Eric reached out and picked it up, folding it into his trouser pocket.

“Good,” his father said. “You didn’t lunge.” He didn’t look up. “You have a picture of this Lorraine?”

“No. Sorry. Are you seeing anybody yourself?”

His father shrugged. “There’s a woman in Chicago I visit every month or so. Or she comes here. Someone I met through business. A small affair. Morgan, her name is. Her children are grown up, same age as you. She has a pretty laugh. The thought of that laugh has gotten me through many a desperate week. We’re thinking of embarking on a short cruise together in the Caribbean this winter.” He stopped. “But it’s all quite pointless.” He rubbed his forehead. “On the other hand, maybe it isn’t. I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

After lunch they made small talk, then went into the living room. Just before Eric left, his father said, “You snob, you never call. You always wait for me to do it. It’s beggarly and humiliating. You never invite me over to your sordid lair. It irritates me.” He was staring at the television screen, where a man was applying shaving cream to a bathroom mirror. “I don’t like to be the one who calls all the damn time.” He sneezed. “Still collecting parking tickets?”

“Still doing it. Dad, I gotta go. Lorraine’s expecting me later this afternoon. I’ll be in touch.”

“Right.” He started to extend his hand, thought better of it, and stood up. He held out his arms and embraced his son. He was four inches shorter than Eric, and when they drew together, his son’s thick beard brushed against his face. “Be sure to call,” he said. Eric nodded, turned around, and hurried toward the door. “Don’t you dare hold me in contempt,” he said inaudibly, under his breath.

With his hand on the doorknob, Eric shouted backward, “Thanks for the money, Dad. Thanks for everything.”

Then he was gone.

Mr. Bradbury stood in the same position until he heard the elevator doors close. Then he backed into the living room and stood for a moment watching the television screen. He turned off the set. In his study, he bent down at the desk and subtracted two thousand dollars from the balance in his checking account. He glanced at the bookshelves above his desk, reached for a copy of Chekhov’s stories and another volume, Keats’s poems, put them on the desk, then walked down the hallway to the front closet. He put on a sweater and told Elena he was stepping out for a few minutes.

He crossed the street and headed for the park. In the center of this park was a pond, and on the far side of the water was a rowboat concession. He counted the rowboats in the pond: twelve. Feeling the onset of hangover, he strolled past some benches, reaching into his shirt pocket for a breadstick he had stashed there for the ducks. As he walked, he broke up the bread and threw it into the water, but the water was littered with bread and the ducks didn’t notice him.

When he reached the rowboat concession, he paid a twenty-five-dollar deposit and left his driver’s license as security, then let the skinny acned attendant fit him for an orange life jacket. He carried the two oars in either hand and eased himself into the blue rowboat he’d been assigned. He tried breathing the air for the scent but could smell nothing but his own soured breath. Taking the oars off the dock, panting, he fit them into the oarlocks. Then, with his back to the prow of the boat, he rowed, the joints squeaking, out to the middle of the lake.

Once there, he lifted the oars and brought them over the gunwales. He listened. The city traffic was reduced to vague honks and hums; the loudest sounds came from the other boaters and from their radios. Taking a cigarette out of his sweater pocket, he gazed at his building, counting the floors until he could see his bedroom window. There I am, he thought. A rowboat went by to his right, with a young man sitting in front, and his girlfriend pulling at the oars. He watched them until they were several boat lengths away, and then he cursed them quietly. He flicked his cigarette into the water.

As he gazed at the west side of the pond, he noticed that the apple blossoms floating on the water had collected into a kind of clump. The water lapped against the boat. He bent over and with his right index finger began absentmindedly to write his name on the pond’s pale green surface. When he realized what he was doing, he started to laugh.

Eric called in September, November, and twice in December. In a remote and indistinct voice he said he wasn’t having an easy time of it, living by himself. Two weeks before Christmas he announced that he had moved out of the cabin and was living in a rented room in Ely, where he worked as a stock boy at the supermarket. He thought he would give the experiment another month and then call it quits. He said — as if it were incidental — that he had met another woman.

“What about Lorraine?” his father asked.

“That’s over.”

“It’s a good thing you fall out of love as fast as you fall in. Who’s the new one?”

“You’ll meet her.”

“I hope so.”

In February, after a heavy snowstorm, Eric called again to say that he’d be down the following Saturday and would bring Darlene with him. “Darlene?” his father asked. “I knew a Darlene once. She ran a bowling alley.”

“You should talk,” his son said. “Wilford.”

“All right, all right. I see your point. So you’ll be here on Saturday. Looking forward to it. How long’ll you stay?”

“How should I know?” his son said.

George buzzed the apartment to let him know that his son and his son’s new girlfriend had just come in. Mr. Bradbury was waiting at the door when he heard the elevator slide open, and he went on waiting there, under the foyer’s chandelier, while in the hallway Eric and Darlene worked out a plan. The only remark he could catch was his son’s “Don’t let him tell you …” He couldn’t hear the rest of it. What to do, or what to think, or something of the sort.

After they knocked, he waited thirty seconds, timing it by his Rolex. When his son knocked a second time, harder and faster, he said, “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

He opened the door and saw them: a surprised young couple. His son had shaved his beard and cut his hair short; the effect was to make him seem exposed and small-townish. He looked past his father into the apartment with the roving gaze of a narcotics agent. “Hi, Dad,” he said. The woman next to him looked at Eric, then at his father, waiting for them to shake hands or embrace; when they did neither, she said, “Hi, Mr. Bradbury,” and thrust out her hand. “Darlene Spinney.” The hand was rough and chapped. She glanced into the apartment. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Eric’s father said, moving aside so that they could step into the foyer. “Come in and warm up.” Eric slipped off his parka, draped it over a chair, groaned, and immediately walked down the hallway to the bathroom. Mr. Bradbury helped Darlene with her coat, noting from the label that she had purchased it at Sears. The woman’s figure was substantial, north-woods robust: capable of lifting canoes. “I wonder where that son of mine went to?”

“Eric?” She glanced down the hall. “He’s in the bathroom. I’ll tell you something, Mr. Bradbury: you make your son real nervous. He’s as jumpy as a cat. What I think it is, he’s got diarrhea, bringing me here and seeing you. That’s two strikes. One more strike and the boy’ll be out cold.”

He looked at her with some interest. “Come into the living room, Miss Spinney,” he said. “Care for a drink?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a beer?”

“Sure.” He leaned toward her. “I suppose my son has warned you about my drinking.”

“What he said was you sometimes have hard stuff before lunch.”

“That is correct.” He went to the refrigerator, took out a Heineken, and poured it into a glass. “That is what I do. But only on weekends. You can think of it as my hobby. Did he tell you anything else?”

“Oh, I asked, all right. Nothing much but mumbles.”

“What’d you ask?”

“Well, for instance, did you get mean.”

“When I drank.”

“Right.”

“Why’d you want to know?” He came out of the kitchen and handed the glass to her. They both walked toward the front window.

“Do you know mean drinkers, Mr. Bradbury? I don’t guess so. I know a few. In my family, this is. It’s not nice conversation and I won’t go through all the details, about being hit and everything. This,” she said, looking out the window, “is different. I sort of figured you were a man who doesn’t have to hit things.”

“I never learned,” he said, giving the words a resentful torque. “I hired people. Now where did you and Eric meet? I can’t imagine.”

“At the supermarket. He was working in produce, and I was up there at the checkout. I’d never seen him in town before he started working in the back. Well, I mean”—she looked for a place to set down her beer, hesitated, and held on to it—“I thought, oh, what a nice face. Two glances and you don’t have to think about it. So we ate our lunches together. Traded cookies and carrots. He’s nice. He gave me a parking ticket. He said it was an old joke? Anyway, we talked. He wasn’t like the local boys.”

“No?”

“No. He can sit by himself. When he works, he listens to the boss, Mr. Glusac, giving him orders, and he has this so-what look on his face. He’s sweet. Like he’s always making plans. He’s a dreamer. Can’t fix a car.”

“I don’t think he ever learned.”

“That’s the truth. Doesn’t know what gaskets are, says he never learned to use a socket wrench. That car of his was hard-starting and dieseling, and I told him to tune it, you know, with a timing light, and he tells me he’s never removed a spark plug in his life. ‘We didn’t do that,’ he says. Jesus, it’s a long way down.” She was gazing at the frozen pond in the park.

“Eleven floors,” Mr. Bradbury said. “You can’t hear the harlot’s cry from street to street up here, more’s the pity. I look down on it all from a great height. I have an eleventh-floor view of things.”

She said, “I can see a man walking a dog. Eric says you write commercials.” She sat down on the sofa and glanced at the muted newscaster on the television set. He noticed that her fingernails were painted bright red, and that the back of one hand was scarred. “Is it hard, writing commercials?”

“Not if your whole life prepares you to do it. And of course there are the anodynes. If it weren’t for them, my heart wouldn’t be in it.”

“Anodynes.”

“I’m sorry. Painkillers. Things that come in bottles and tubes.”

“I only had a year of community college before I had to go to work,” Darlene said, and just as Mr. Bradbury understood what her remark was supposed to explain, she said, “I’m always afraid I’m boring people. Eric says I don’t bore him. Do you know your TV set is on?”

“Yes.”

“Why’s it on if you aren’t listening to it?”

“I like to have someone in the room with me, in case I get a call from the fraud police. Ah, hey, here’s the kid.”

Eric had reappeared silently. His father turned to look at him; he might have been standing in the hallway, out of sight, listening to them both for the last five minutes. Eric sat down next to Darlene on the sofa, putting his arm around her shoulders. She snuggled close to him, and Mr. Bradbury resisted the impulse to close his eyes. He sat down in his Barcelona chair. “So,” he began, with effort, “here you are. Give me a report. How was nature?”

“Nature was fine.” With his free hand Eric brutally rubbed his nose. The nose was running, and he wiped his hand on the sofa.

“Fine? Did the flora and fauna suit you? I want a report. Did you discover yourself? Let’s hear something about the pastoral panorama.” Darlene, he noticed, was staring at his mouth.

“It was fine,” Eric said, staring, without subtlety, at the ceiling.

“I hate it when you look at the ceiling. A world without objects is a sensible emptiness. Come on, Eric, let’s have a few details. Did you from outward forms win the passion and the life, whose fountains are within?”

“My dad is a quoter,” Eric said. He glanced at Darlene. “He quotes.” He saw his father looking at him. “It was fine,” he repeated, facing his father.

“He won’t talk about that time alone in that cabin, Mr. Bradbury, so you might as well not ask. Lord knows I’ve tried.”

“Just between him and his psyche, eh?”

“ ‘Psyche,’ ” Eric said, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ.”

“There you go, criticizing my vocabulary again. When will I be allowed to use the six-dollar words they taught us at college? Never, it appears.” He smiled at Darlene. “Pay no attention to me. I inflict my irony on everybody.”

A long pause followed. Eric’s father had begun counting the seconds in groups of two when Darlene said, “You wouldn’t believe all the city people who come up north to commune with nature. Like that woman Lorraine, her family. We see them all summer. They buy designer backpacks and dehydrated foods they don’t eat. Then they sleep on the ground for two weeks, complain of colds, and whiz home in their station wagons. Me, I’m lucky if I can sleep in a bed.”

“Darlene has insomnia,” Eric explained.

“Right. I do. That’s why I don’t understand people sleeping on the ground. Who wants that when you can shower in a bathroom and sleep in a bed and look out from the eleventh floor? Not me.”

“Insomnia,” Mr. Bradbury said. “How interesting. Ever tried pills?”

“You have insomnia?” she asked. “Try bananas. Or turkey. They have an enzyme, tryptophan, and that’s what you need. Unless you’re hardcore, like me. I have to run, eat bananas, skip coffee, but it usually doesn’t make any difference.”

“We jog together,” Eric said.

They were cuddling there, Darlene and Eric, Mr. Bradbury decided, to test his powers of detachment. Before this was over he would be a Zen saint. He thought longingly of the vodka bottle in the kitchen cupboard, whose cap he had not, not, removed once today: his hands were folded in his lap, as he watched Darlene place her hand on Eric’s leg. The truth, he thought, raising one hand to scratch his ear, is an insufferable test of a man’s resources. Tilting his head imperceptibly, he glanced for relief at the Lichtenstein above the sofa. “Bananas?” he said.

“Eric says you wrote those Colonel Crisp commercials.” Her voice was egging him on into the kitchen: glass, ice cubes, and the tender care of the liquor.

“Yes.” He would not stand it. He could not stand it, and began to get up.

Darlene twisted around, so that Eric’s hand fell off her shoulders onto the sofa, to look at the wall behind her. “What’s that?” she asked.

“That? Oh, that’s a Lichtenstein.” He sat down again.

“Is it valuable?”

“Yes. I suppose so. Yes.”

She was looking at it closely, probably, Mr. Bradbury thought, counting the dots in the woman’s face. “Do you write radio commercials, too?”

“Oh, yes. I once wrote a spot for a lightbulb company with a Janáek fanfare in the background. That made them sit up.”

“Jesus!” Eric stood suddenly. “I can’t stand this!” He went down the hallway, and they both heard a door slam. Just then Elena came into the living room to announce that lunch was ready.

“It’s a hard life up here on the eleventh floor,” Mr. Bradbury mused. “Maybe he went to get a banana.” He waited. “Or some white meat.”

“I’ll get him,” Darlene said, rising. “His moods’ve never bothered me. Did you know,” she began, then stopped. She apparently decided to plunge ahead, because she said, “He talks a lot about his mother.”

“Not to me. She died of cancer, you know.”

“Yeah. He said so. He remembers all of it. He likes you, Mr. Bradbury. Don’t get him wrong. He’s crazy about you. I shouldn’t say this.”

“Oh, please say it. Crazy about me?”

“Oh sure. Didn’t you know?” She looked surprised.

Mortified and pleased, he watched her disappear down the hall.

After lunch, whose terrain was crossed by Mr. Bradbury’s painfully constructed comic anecdotes about daily work in an advertising agency, he suggested that they all go out for a walk in the park. Eric and Darlene agreed with an odd fervor. After bundling themselves up, they took the elevator down, Darlene checking her face, making moues, in the elevator’s polished mirror.

Outside the temperature was ten degrees above zero, with no wind, and a sunny sky. When they reached the park, Darlene ran out ahead of them onto the pond, where the park authorities had cleared a rink for skating. A loudspeaker was playing Waldteufel.

“Don’t lecture me,” Eric said. “Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.”

“Who, me?” Darlene was now out of earshot. “That’s for suckers. Can you tell me yet how long you’re staying?”

“Why do you keep asking? A few days. Then we’re going north again. I’m going to be up there for the rest of the winter and then re-enroll next fall and graduate in the spring.”

“I don’t suppose she’s going with you.”

“I don’t know.” He waited. “She’s interested in our money. The money.”

“A good woman’s failing. I kind of like her,” Mr. Bradbury said. “Diamond in the rough and all that. At first I thought she was queen of the roller derby. Didn’t know if she was playing with a full deck.”

“I almost proposed to her,” Eric said. “Almost.”

“Oh Christ.” His father stomped his right foot in the snow. “You, with all your, well, call it potential, and you want to marry a girl who counts out change?”

She was far ahead of them on the ice, pulling two children on skates around in a circle. The children yelled with pleasure.

“She’s … different, Pop. With her, everything’s simpler. They don’t have women like her around here, I don’t think. You don’t get what I mean at all.”

“Oh, I get it. You went up north looking for nature, and you found it, and you brought it back, and there it, I mean she, is. Overbite, straight hair, chapped hands, whopping tits, and all.”

“You wouldn’t believe,” Eric said, watching her, “how comforting she is.”

“What?” He stopped and waited. “Well, I might.”

“When I wake up, she’s always awake. She has a way of touching that makes me feel wonderful. Generous.” Now they were both watching her. “It’s like love comes easily to her.”

“God, you’re romantic,” his father said. “It must be your age.”

“Want to hear about how wonderful she is? In bed?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

“You used to want to hear.”

“I shouldn’t’ve asked. That was a mistake. Glückschmerz. Besides, couples don’t live in bed. You can’t insult a waiter or cash a check in bed. As a paradigm for life, it’s inadequate.”

Eric was showing an unsteady smile. “I want to throw myself at her feet,” he said. “We’re the king and queen of lovers. Love. God, I just lap it up. We can go and go. I don’t want life. I want love. And so does she.”

“Have we always talked this way?” his father asked. “It’s deplorable.”

“We started getting a little raw about two years ago. That was when you began asking me about my girlfriends. Some pretty raw questions, things you shouldn’t have been asking. I mean, we all know why, right?”

“Just looking out for my boy.” In the cold, he could feel his eyelid twitching.

“You could mind your own business, Pop. You could try that.” He said this with equanimity. Darlene was running back toward them. She ran awkwardly, with her upper torso leaning forward and her arms flailing. Three children were following her. As she panted, her breath was visible in the cold air.

“Sometimes I think I lead a strange life,” Eric’s father said. “Sometimes I think that none of this is real.”

“Yeah, Chekhov,” Eric said. “I read him, just like you told me to.” Darlene ran straight up to Eric and put her blue mittens, which had bullet-sized balls of snow stuck to them, up to both sides of his face. She exposed all her teeth when she smiled. She took Eric’s left hand. Then she reached down with her other hand and grasped Mr. Bradbury’s doeskin glove. Standing between them, she said, “I love winter. I love the cold.”

“Yes,” Mr. Bradbury said. “The bitterness invigorates.”

Not letting go of either of their hands, she walked between them back to the apartment building.

They sat around for the rest of the afternoon; Darlene tried to take a nap, and Eric and his father watched a basketball game, DePaul against Marquette. When the game was half over, Eric turned to his father and asked, “Where are your cigarettes, Pop?”

“My little friends? I evicted them.”

“How come?”

“I quit in December. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought I was fixing to die. The outlines of my heart were all but visible under the skin, it hurt so much. I felt like a corpse ready for the anatomy lesson. So: I stopped. Imagine this. I threw my gold Dunhill lighter, the one your mother gave me, down the building’s trash shaft, along with all the cigarettes in the house. I heard the lighter whine and clatter all the way to the heap at the bottom. What a scarifying loss was there. And how I miss the nicotine. But I wasn’t about to go. I may look like Samuel Gompers, but I’m only fifty-two. I figured there must be more to life than patient despair, right?”

Sitting on the floor, leaning against the sofa on which his father was sitting, Eric held his hand up in the air behind him. “Congratulations,” he said. The two of them shook hands. “That took real guts.”

“Thank you.” He checked his fingers, still yellow from nicotine stains. “Yes, it did. I agree.” He thumped his chest. “Guts.”

At dinner Darlene was gulping her wine. “I don’t get to drink this much at home. And furthermore, I shouldn’t. Wine keeps you awake. Did you know that? What is this, French?” She peered at the label. “Romanian. Well. That was my next guess.”

“A nice table wine,” Mr. Bradbury said. “And when it turns, you can use it as salad dressing.”

She looked at Eric. Eric shook his head, shrugged, and continued eating.

“He never says much at dinner,” Darlene said, pointing at Eric. Mr. Bradbury nodded. After a pause, she said, “I don’t think I ever told you about the time I met Bill Cosby.”

At one o’clock Mr. Bradbury found himself lying awake, staring at the curtains. His back itched, and as he rubbed his neck he thought he felt a swelling. The damnable Romanian wine had given him a headache. Sitting up, he lowered his feet to the floor and put on his slippers. Then, shuffling across the bedroom, he opened the door that led out to the hallway.

He was halfway to the kitchen when he stopped outside Eric’s bedroom door. He heard whispering. He stood and listened. It wasn’t whispering so much as a drone from his son. “ ‘The only completely stationary object in the room,’ ” he was saying, “ ‘was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon.’ ” As Eric went on — Daisy and Tom and Jordan Baker undramatically droned into existence — his voice, indifferent to the story, spread out its soporific waves of narration. His father turned around and padded back into his own bedroom.

Three hours later, still feeling sleepless, Mr. Bradbury rose again out of bed and again advanced down the hall. All the lights were blazing. Halfway to the kitchen, he looked toward the refrigerator and saw the two of them huddled together side by side at the dining-room table, Darlene in her bathrobe, Eric in a nightshirt. Randomly he noticed the width of his son’s shoulders, the fullness of Darlene’s breasts. Her head was in her hands. Unobserved, Mr. Bradbury watched his son butter the bread, apply the mayonnaise, add the sandwich meat and the lettuce, close the sandwich, cut it in half, remove the crusts, and then hand it on its plate to her. “Thank you,” she said. She began to eat. She chewed with her mouth open. She said, “You’re so sweet. I love you.” She kissed the air in his direction. Mr. Bradbury moved back, stood still, then turned toward his bedroom.

He closed the door and clicked on the bedside lamp. From far down on the other side of the hallway, he heard Darlene’s loud laugh. He started to slip in under the covers, thought better of it, and went to his window to part the curtains. Getting back into bed, he switched off the bulb; then, with his head on the pillow, he gazed at the city skyline, half consciously counting the few apartments in the high-rise across the street that still had all their lights burning.