Robert Tanenbaum - Resolved

"Oh, hi, Dad," said the boy. "Pretty neat, huh? We made almost forty dollars since rush hour started."

"Giancarlo, why are you begging in the street?"

"I'm not begging. I'm providing music for weary travelers. It's part of the service economy."

"Uh-huh. What about the sign?"

"Oh, that was Zak's idea. He thought it was more authentic."

"It would be more authentic if it was scrawled in crayon on a piece of dirty cardboard and not printed on glossy paper using a two thousand-dollar computer."

"You think so? Maybe we should change it."

"Maybe you should lose the sign and the soliciting money on the streets routine. Unfortunately, some people have to earn their living this way and you don't. It doesn't strike me as fair for you to scarf up charitable contributions that should go to them."

The boy took off his dark glasses. His eyes were perfect, huge and glossy brown, and rimmed with lashes thick as mink. He could see out of them only intermittently and imperfectly, owing to a shotgun pellet lodged in his visual cortex. The rest of his face was in the style that fifteenth-century Florentines liked to cast in bronze or paint to suggest heavenly beings. Karp was always a little stunned to find he had fathered a child (two of them actually) who looked like that, especially after the girl had turned out so plain. When Giancarlo and his brother walked down the street, they stopped traffic. Just now the divine features were cramped into an expression of shock.

"Da-ad! We don't keep the money," the boy exclaimed. "We give it to Lucy and she gives it to the poor. I mean, duuuh!"

"I beg your pardon, then," said Karp. "This was Lucy's idea?"

"It was all of us's actually. We never have any money and she said we could do good and do well at the same time and I like singing and playing and it's kind of a goof. In Muslim countries, all the people have to give alms so they think people who beg are really doing poor people a favor, because they can, like, give a penny and then they're cool."

"Well, we're not a Muslim country yet, are we?" said Karp a little testily. He felt he had been caught wrong by his kid, never a pleasant experience of fatherhood, and he was also aware that it was his embarrassment and not the boy's that was now driving his bad mood. "And what's this about no money? You both get an allowance."

"When you remember. And it's tacky for us to have to nag for it. And it's not the same as when you earn it."

"I thought it was for the poor."

"We take a small administrative fee," said Giancarlo blandly.

"Oh ho."

"No, Dad, real charities do it, too. Lucy says. Even Mom's charity does."

"I'm sure. By the way, where are Lucy and Zak?"

"They went up Broadway to get some new sneakers."

"How about you? Don't you need new ones, too?"

"Da-ad." The long-suffering diphthong. "Obviously, if they fit Zak they'll fit me."

"Oh, you mean… you're twins?" said Karp, and Giancarlo laughed, a glory in itself. Which did not much improve Karp's unease. Lucy had slotted into the space Marlene had occupied so smoothly that it was only in moments like this that Karp understood how little he knew about the domestic arrangements necessary to raise two boys. Marlene had done it all- shopping, school, church, feeding, doctor, dentist. Like most men of a certain stamp, Karp had restricted his parenting largely to the fun stuff: sports, excursions, roughhousing, giving valuable advice. He realized that dads were supposed to be different nowadays, to be more domestic, but… he would think about that later, maybe have a talk with Lucy. Other charges accumulated on the rap sheet he kept in his head for Marlene.

"Well, I'm hungry," said Karp. "Why don't we see about gathering the clan and getting something to eat?"

"Could we go to Mercerama?"

This was perhaps Karp's least favorite place to consume calories: a large echoing chamber on Mercer Street full of video games, pinball machines, boys between eight and fourteen, guilty parents, and electronic cacophony. It served greasy pizzas and burgers. The guilty parent said, "Sure. That'll be fun."

"You really know how to show a girl a good time, Dad," said Lucy, rolling her eyes. "Why did you agree to eat here? You hate this place."

Karp was looking through the mob of juvenile males, trying to spot his sons. Zak was at a video game, killing pixels. A couple of younger kids were sneaking looks at his scores, which were, as usual, spectacular. And an even more interested group was observing Giancarlo, who was playing Skee-Ball.

"How the hell does he do that?" Karp asked, rather than answer her question. "He can't see."

"It's called blind sight," she said. "There's nothing wrong with his eyes; he just has a problem processing the image. But he can make an association between what his eyes take in and the sound of the ball, so he gets better at hitting the holes. I asked at the lab and it was explained to me in tedious detail."

"What do they say about the prognosis?"

"Guarded hopeful. It could get better, but it could get worse, too. Neurons tend to deteriorate if they're not used." With a sigh she added, "There's no treatment and no point in talking about it. Wait and pray is all we can do. He seems pretty happy, though, considering. How was your day? Bad, right?"

"Oh, you know. The usual crapola. I had a run-in with Laura Rachman in which Jack decided to hang some poor schmuck to make a point. How could you tell I had a bad day?"

"Your eyes get all pouchy and you snap at the boys more than usual. As you used to continually tell me, don't take the blame for every damn thing that goes wrong in the world."

Karp let out a short rueful laugh. "And aren't I sorry now! How about you? How were the poor today?"

"Always with us. But I've picked up an admirer."

Karp felt a small chill. "Oh?"

"Yes. Larry. Yesterday he was Joe Fellini, but today he's Larry Larsen. He even showed me a driver's license. He said he was embarrassed about giving out his real name because of having to eat at a soup kitchen. But now he trusts me. We're pals, now."

"This is, um, not a guy like the last guy, I hope."

"Meaning David Grale?"

"Yeah, him."

"No. But also the dangerous type. Or likes to think he is. He's an ex-con. Very handsome in a movie star way, square jaw, thick dark hair, lying blue eyes. He's got that terrific body-builder shape they all come out of the can with. A lot of magnetism."

"Oy vey. When's the wedding?"

"Yeah, right. No, Dad, this is an old guy, over forty probably."

"Oh, that's a relief. Because most guys give up thinking about sex when they're thirty-nine or so."

"I meant, it's not that kind of thing, not a kid-crush thing like I had with Grale… what's wrong?"

"Nothing."

"Yes, there is. You just sucked all the air out of this booth."

What was wrong. Karp had just processed the observation that well over three quarters of the adults in the place were middle-aged professional men like himself, casually dressed, with stunned expressions and false smiles. Were they all like him, currying favor with their kids by taking them to this hideous place, feeding them empty calories, supplying game tokens? Was he in divorced dad hell?

He became aware of his daughter looking at him peculiarly, waiting for him to speak. He dismissed the idea of sliding by with a polite fiction about just being tired. The girl had a bullshit detector equal to his own. He thought to himself: But I'm not divorced. I'm at home and my kids are home, too. What was it, then?

"I don't know, hon," he said. "This place gets on my nerves. It symbolizes… I don't know, barbarism: noise, hypnotic lights, children practicing reckless driving and killing. And it just made me think, when you mentioned Grale, like, Oh God, my daughter has a close relationship with a serial killer, and her nanny was a Vietcong assassin, and my wife arranged to have a couple of dozen people killed and got away with it, and she's hiding from me and her family, and one of my sons is blind and the other one is deep into violence and hardly ever talks… it's a little too much, you know? I didn't want this. And somehow, despite what you say, I feel it's my fault."