The Old Man(51)
Three hours later Brian McDonald walked along the side of his condominium building toward the door. This had been one of the worst afternoons he’d ever had. It had been absolutely insane. When he was a child the McDonalds had always seemed to be a family like everyone else’s, except a little better. That had lasted until he was nineteen.
Brian had been away at Stanford, working intently to complete a double major in engineering and computer science. He remembered the day clearly. It had been near the end of fall semester. At 5:00 a.m. he was shaken awake by a small earthquake. It was one of those sharp jolts with a sound like a bang. He had been relieved that it wasn’t the kind that sounded like a freight train blasting through walls into his bedroom. He sat up and looked around. It was still not daylight but he could tell nothing had even fallen on the floor. He went back to sleep until seven, when he heard a rumbling in the hallway.
At first he thought this must be the real thing, the start of the quake that had been heralded by the small foreshock two hours earlier. But then he heard the voices and recognized the rumble as the sound of heavy feet running in the hallway. “Get up, you lazy bastards! The semester is over. The rest of exam week is canceled!”
His housemates, Serge and Najib, burst into his room with a laptop and showed him the message from the president and the deans. The earthquake had dislodged a chunk of the 1891 Frederick Law Olmsted fa?ade of the chapel. A county official had declared the campus buildings off-limits until they could all be inspected and cleared. It occurred to Brian that the official must have been better at history than science. He knew that the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had severely damaged the campus, but didn’t seem to know that foreshocks before major quakes were rare. But it didn’t matter. The decision forced the university to cancel the last two days of final exam week. Brian got up, changed his plane reservation to leave two days earlier, and stepped into the shower.
When he arrived home the next afternoon, he thought he’d be giving his parents a surprise. His mother would be out giving a piano lesson and his father would be at the office. Brian took a cab from the airport, walked in the front door of the house, set his suitcase down, and decided to check the refrigerator. He walked toward the kitchen past the open arch of the den—and stopped. On the leather couch in the den his father was having sex with his assistant, Steffie.
That instant was like the initiation of a chain reaction. He heard himself say, “Dad?” Steffie screamed and disengaged, and then sprinted toward the only exit from the room, pushing past Brian and across the hall to the nearest bathroom. Brian’s father put on his pants with a thoughtful demeanor. Then he and Brian had a man-to-man conversation in the den, staring into each other’s eyes over the pile of Steffie’s clothes on the coffee table.
Brian’s arrival that day dislodged the last pillar that had been propping up the rickety structure of the family. Chunks fell, hit other parts, and those tore away from others as piece by piece the rest succumbed to gravity.
It was about ten minutes before Steffie reappeared. She padded out wearing one of his father’s jackets from the hall closet. She snatched up her clothes from the coffee table and went back into the bathroom to dress. Then she reappeared and walked out the front door. She didn’t say good-bye and nobody inquired how she planned to get back to the office. When Brian’s mother came home about two hours later and saw Brian there, she was very surprised. When her husband pulled her aside a few minutes later to talk to her, she had another surprise.
Brian’s mother, Zoe, had a couple of long stony-faced discussions with her husband. By the end of the second one the divorce had been set in motion. A couple of weeks later the last traces of Darryl McDonald had been removed. Within a month, the house where Brian had been carried home from the hospital after his birth and where he’d been brought up—the place he’d imagined he might inherit someday and retire to after a long successful career—had a big FOR SALE BY COLDWELL BANKER sign erected on its front lawn.
His father, Darryl, was living in a small sublet condo with Steffie, who had not only been promoted from secret mistress to fiancée, but also artificially matured by being redubbed Stephanie. Because the incident that had precipitated all of this, when Brian had walked into the den, had not dimmed or lost any of its visual clarity for either Brian or Stephanie, their meetings were rare and uncomfortable after that.
In the years since then, Brian had managed to maintain cordial relations with both of his parents. At first he’d considered himself to be closest to his mother, who represented home, love, and childhood memories. She was the wronged party, and she had always been much more important in Brian’s life than his father, who had been largely a figurehead, absent most of the time. Even in the very uncomfortable and treacherous topic of sex that loomed unmentioned but enormous in the background while the family crumbled, she seemed to be in the right. Zoe had always, at least in his presence, been kind and affectionate to her husband. She wasn’t exactly an ingénue when this happened, but she had taken good care of herself. She hadn’t deserved such outright rejection.
But he could also feel sympathy for the temptation Darryl had felt around Steffie. In the terrible incident, Brian had not been able to take his eyes off her, and he recalled that she was like a ripe fruit, all plump, perfect, rounded curves and sugary succulence. Even as she had charged into him to push through the doorway, he recalled, her face had been beautiful, like a blushing angel. Brian decided it was a sign of his own maturity to concede that his father was only a weak, mortal human being, and that being tempted did not make him worse than most.