French Braid(69)

“Well, that is just…transparent,” Eddie said.

“Excuse me?”

“You must have at least suspected who she was, and yet you fall all over yourself rushing out to be seen.”

“I’m thinking we could put the rocker up in the guest room,” Claude said.

“And how did you explain your presence?” Eddie demanded.

Claude released the rocker and turned to look at him. He said, “Why should I have to explain my presence?”

Eddie didn’t even have words for this. He just flung his hands out helplessly. There was a silence.

Then Claude said, “Oh, babe. She knows.”

Eddie dropped his hands.

“She knew all along,” Claude said.

And he resumed sliding the rocker across the room. When he reached the stairs, he picked it up by both arms and began trudging upward as Eddie watched.

A slow bloom was coming over him, a flush that warmed his face. Of course she knew. He saw that now. And it wasn’t only Lily who knew, because here he was, forty-one years old, and yet no one in his family had ever asked him whether he had a girlfriend. No one had said, at weddings, “Your turn next, Eddie!” And he remembered how his cousin Robby the Boy, watching TV with him years ago, had abruptly switched channels when somebody onscreen called somebody else a faggot.

You would think this realization would come as a relief to him. And it did, in part. He felt a rush of love for his whole family, whom it seemed he had underestimated. He had thought that guarding his secret was a kindness to them; he was protecting them from knowledge that would hurt them. But now he saw that not telling them had been more hurtful, and it was they who had been kind.

He stood gazing up the stairs in a sort of trance, overwhelmed with regret for all the time he had wasted.





8


David Garrett retired from teaching when he was sixty-eight years old. He had planned to work longer, but halfway through spring semester of 2020 the pandemic struck and all his classes switched to Zoom. It turned out he wasn’t much good at Zoom. He winced at the sight of his own face on the screen; he deplored the artificial tone of his voice; he felt he was shortchanging his students. Not only that, but the senior class play, which he had directed for the past forty-odd years, abruptly folded in the middle of rehearsals. In fact, drama classes in general were a thing of the past now, along with art, chorus, and orchestra—all the subjects that made school worthwhile, in David’s opinion. He had never enjoyed his English classes half as much as drama. So at the end of the semester he handed in his notice: he would not be returning next fall. And of course there would be no summer school this year.

Greta had retired some time ago, so she was accustomed by now to the stay-at-home life. David, though, found sheltering in place more of an adjustment than he had expected. “You know how when the electricity fails, you marvel that you could ever have taken it for granted,” he told her. “Well, that’s how I feel now when I remember that the world was wide open, once upon a time. We used to come and go at will, remember? Hit the grocery store, head out to the mall, have dinner at a restaurant whenever we got the urge…”

Greta smiled at this. “Not that we really did, so much,” she said. “I had to pry you out of your study with a crowbar, as I recall.”

“Well, you just watch what happens once things get back to normal,” he told her.

Privately he thought, If they get back. But he didn’t say that aloud.

What was easier to adjust to—shockingly easy, really—was their sudden lack of a social life. In the past they had gathered now and then with a few choice friends, people from the school or from his theater projects, and yet often he had been conscious, as he sat conversing with them, of a renegade thought so insistent that he had worried he might blurt it out by accident: I like you very much, but do we really have to see each other? Now it emerged that they did not. They were not supposed to. They could exchange regretful emails or even, in Greta’s case, talk on the telephone, but mostly it was just the two of them. David didn’t mind this in the least. It might have been overstating to say that he found it a relief, but…well, it was a relief, to be honest. If only they’d had their children nearby, he would have felt perfectly contented.

Then Nicholas phoned.

Nicholas lived in New York City with his wife, Juana, who was a gastroenterologist, and their five-year-old son, Benny. They hadn’t visited since the pandemic started, and David worried they wouldn’t again for months or even years. But what Nicholas said now was, “How would you feel about Benny and me coming to stay for a while?”

“Are you serious?” David asked. He was the one who’d answered the phone—made a grab for it the instant he saw the caller ID. He raised his eyebrows meaningfully at Greta, who was standing next to him waiting for her turn to talk.

“Would it worry you?” Nicholas was asking. “We’d self-quarantine for two weeks ahead of time, needless to say, and get tested before we set out. We do know you’re both at risk, at your ages.”

“We’re not at risk! We’re healthy as horses!”

“What? What?” Greta was asking, so David covered the receiver long enough to tell her, “He wants to come stay here awhile with Benny.”

Greta clasped her hands under her chin and nodded vigorously.