You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [2]
“What’s the matter?” I ask. Here is my child wary of me in a strange kitchen in California, his mother’s ashes spread long ago over the Potomac, the objects of our lives together stored in boxes or sold.
“You actually came,” he says.
“I’ve invented a new bicycle,” I say but this seems to reach him like news of some fresh death. Eric hugs Graham there in front of me. I watch my son rest his head against this fellow’s shoulder like a tired soldier on a train. “It’s going to have a self-charging battery,” I say, sitting again at the table to review my sketches.
WITH GRAHAM HERE my idea is picking up speed and while he’s in the shower I unpack my bags, rearrange the furniture in the cottage, and tack my specs to the wall. Returning to the house, I ask Eric if I can use the phone and he says that’s fine and then he tells me, “Graham hasn’t been sleeping so great lately, but I know he really does want to see you.”
“Sure, no hard feelings, fine.”
“He’s been dealing with a lot recently. Maybe some things you could talk to him about . . . and I think you might—”
“Sure, sure, no hard feelings,” and then I call my lawyer, my engineer, my model builder, three advertising firms whose numbers I find in the yellow pages, the American Association of Retired Persons—that market will be key—an old college friend who I remember once told me he’d competed in the Tour de France, figuring he’ll know the bicycle industry angle, my bank manager to discuss financing, the patent office, the Cal Tech physics lab, the woman I took to dinner the week before I left Baltimore, and three local liquor stores before I find one that will deliver a case of Dom Pérignon.
“That’ll be for me!” I call out to Graham as he emerges from the bedroom to answer the door what seems only minutes later. He moves slowly and seems sapped of life.
“What’s this?”
“We’re celebrating! There’s a new project in the pipeline!”
Graham stares at the bill as though he’s having trouble reading it. Finally, he says, “This is twelve hundred dollars. We’re not buying it.”
I tell him Schwinn will drop that on doughnuts for the sales reps when I’m done with this bike, that Oprah Winfrey’s going to ride it through the halftime show at the Super Bowl.
“There’s been a mistake,” he says to the delivery guy.
I end up having to go outside and pay for it through the window of the truck with a credit card the man is naive enough to accept and I carry it back to the house myself.
“What am I going to do?” I hear Graham whisper.
I round the corner into the kitchen and they fall silent. The two of them make a handsome couple standing there in the gauzy, expiring light of evening. When I was born you could have arrested them for kissing. There ensues an argument that I only half bother to participate in concerning the champagne and my enthusiasm, a recording he learned from his mother; he presses play and the fraction of his ancestry that suffered from conventionalism speaks through his mouth like a ventriloquist: Your-idea-is-fantasy-calm-down-it-will-be-the-ruin-of-you-medication-medication-medication. He has a good mind, my son, always has, and somewhere the temerity to use it, to spear mediocrity in the eye, but in a world that encourages nothing of the sort, the curious boy becomes the anxious man. He must suffer his people’s regard for appearances. Sad. I begin to articulate this with diamond-like precision, which seems only to exacerbate the situation.
“Why don’t we have some champagne?” Eric interjects. “You two can talk this over at dinner.”
An admirable suggestion. I take three glasses from the cupboard, remove a bottle from the case, pop the cork, fill the glasses, and propose a toast to their health.
My niece’s SAAB does eighty-five without a shudder on the way to dinner. With the roof down, smog blowing through my hair,